I never felt happy with the idea that part of what I do is to be an object to be looked at. I thought of my public persona as an entity separate to myself.
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deci