Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.

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• Jonathan Coe:

  I'm one of those unlucky people who had a happy childhood.

• Jonathan Coe:

  I live a perfectly happy and comfortable life in Blair's Britain, but I can't work up much affectio

• Jonathan Coe:

  The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countri

• Jonathan Coe:

  It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countr

• Jonathan Coe:

  You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were st

• Jonathan Coe:

  They were written in the early '90s when I was strapped for cash.

• Jonathan Coe:

  As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live of

• Jonathan Coe:

  My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my m

• Jonathan Coe:

  I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and

• Jonathan Coe:

  I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready