Q&A …

… The Magazine Interview: William Boyd on his Gordonstoun years with Prince Charles, and why novels can best explain humanity | The Sunday Times Magazine | The Sunday Times. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

He certainly inserts writers into everything he does. Even describing how he found and bought his Chelsea house requires the assistance of John le Carré. Thirty years ago, Boyd and his wife, Susan, decided they needed a larger house than the one they had in Fulham. It had to be end-of-terrace to minimise the risk of neighbour noise. They were offered this one — it was cheap for Chelsea. This was because it was, in his mind, written by le Carré at his seediest. “It was,” says Boyd, “very Smiley’s People. There was a woman who rented rooms to gentlemen from the Ministry of Defence. There were Ascot water heaters and socks drying on radiators.”