If you’re ever lucky enough to score an early success as a writer, as happened to me with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for the rest of your life there’s a before-the-fall and an after-the-fall. You look back at the books you wrote before the searchlight picked you out and they read like the books of your innocence; and the books after it, in your low moments, like the strivings of a man on trial. ‘Trying too hard’ the critics cry. I never thought I was trying too hard. I reckoned I owed it to my success to get the best out of myself, and by and large, however good or bad the best was, that was what I did.

And I love writing. I love doing what I’m doing at this moment, scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk on a blackclouded early morning in May, with the mountain rain scuttling down the window and no excuse for tramping down to the railway station under an umbrella because the International New York Times doesn’t arrive until lunchtime.

I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafés, then scurrying home to pick over my booty. When I am in Hampstead there is a bench I favour on the Heath, tucked under a spreading tree and set apart from its companions, and that’s where I like to scribble. I have only ever written by hand. Arrogantly perhaps, I prefer to remain with the centuries-old tradition of unmechanized writing. The lapsed graphic artist in me actually enjoys drawing the words.

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Last fall, I walked out of a Kara Walker exhibit because the white couple beside me kept taking selfies. I’d gone to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles to see African’t, Walker’s black paper silhouettes depicting a dreamy and disturbing antebellum South. I felt jarred watching the smiling pair pose in front of horrifying images: A dismembered white explorer roasts on a spit; a plantation owner rapes an enslaved woman; a white girl fondles a black boy while another shoots air up his ass.

Later, I wondered why I’d walked away. The couple meant no harm; people take pictures in museums all the time. But I resented, or maybe envied, how easily they delighted in the spectacle of Walker’s art, while I found it hard even to look.

If images of slavery make you uncomfortable, then good luck going to the movies. Over the past decade, the entertainment industry has shown a renewed interest in telling stories about the lives of slaves. The Daily Beast declared 2013 “the year of the slavery film,” anticipating the release of 12 Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography, and Belle, which followed a mixed-race aristocrat in eighteenth-century England. An interest in slavery narratives has also extended to television this past year, with Underground, a WGN America series about the Underground Railroad, and a reboot of Roots.

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