Or rather,” he smiles once again, “I like to think I appear sweet-natured.”He was born 58 years ago, the son of a Scottish-Canadian pathologist father and an English athletics teacher mother who specialised in something called the broad jump – like the long jump, he says, but from a standing start. He was evacuated to Canada for five years during the war with his older brother, to grandparents they had never met. His memories of this are hazy now, but when I ask whether it was traumatic, he says, “yes, probably”.He returned to Portsmouth Grammar School and Westminster, to an England of restraint and good manners for which he remains nostalgic. “I was brought up in the Fifties, which was a very courteous decade – probably the only courteous decade in the history of this country But I assumed that that’s what grown-up manners were like.

I don’t think there’s been a transformation into something worse, I simply think there’s been a reversion. I can’t bear the bestiality of some parts of English life.”Among the various things he can’t bear is piped music “I hate it, hate it. It seems to me there is silence, and there is conversation, and there is a place you choose to go to, to listen to music. I hate the presumption.” There’s also the current state of English teaching. “It’s become an almost meaningless discipline – politicised and timid. You don’t read George Eliot for George Eliot any more, you read it for a cause of some kind And timid because that’s a safer way of teaching You’re required to think far less. We’ll have a generation of illiterates.” And then there’s London: “It seems to me that in my lifetime it has turned from being a surprising, gracious city which contained its past harmoniously to appalling.

There’s almost nowhere in London I can bear to be.” So why does he stay? “Friends. And the cricket.”This sort of thing, coupled with the fact that he doesn’t drive and writes on ancient Olympia typewriters – had led me to expect a man who was harsh, irascible, misanthropic, ungenerous of spirit. Which just shows how wrong you can be, because the adjective that comes to mind for his spirit is quaking.At Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia (his father had accepted a job there, and he was just 17, too young, he says, to stay behind) he formed a triumvirate with the son of a rabbi and the son of a bishop to read Kant, Plato and Aristotle. He was always religious himself, “although never an assiduous church-goer” His religion, he says, takes the form of fear. And he laughs, but uneasily – “in the sense,” he explains, “that I think there must be a point to all this. It’s a religious act to have children, wouldn’t you think?” I say it could equally be an attempt to fill the void, togive meaning to meaningless “Yes, well, that seems to me to be a religious sensibility.

We’re talking about the need for faith.”He has two children himself, now 28 and 25 – “terrifying, the responsibility, the fear for their lives, the constant anxiety, and at the same time obviously deep pleasure. I mean, that terrible clich happens to be exact – they’re hostages to fortune.” After many years of married life, he left his wife to live with Victoria Rothschild, a colleague at Queen Mary College, where he taught for 25 years. He doesn’t want to talk about this: pain and anxiety scurry across his features.He works obsessively, although he said once that the only moment of simple happiness to be derived from writing comes when a play is boxed up and he’s poured a drink (it used to be Glenfiddich, but he sticks to champagne now for health reasons). I suggest that this sounds pretty gruelling, and he shrugs and says the work people most enjoy is inevitably painful. “It requires concentration, and when one’s in the middle of a story, it’s difficult to think of anything else – at three in the morning, three in the afternoon, when I wake up But what would I be doing otherwise? Lying like a turnip.