I Think Writers Are Very

We Were In A Great, Seething Moment In The 1970s. There Was A New Labour Government And Everything Seemed Full Of Hope... But, As We Got Older And We Saw How Much Women's Behaviour Contributed To What Was Wrong, We Stopped Being Able To See Ourselves Purely As.

But I Now Think What I Was Doing, In A Completely Unconscious Way, Was Getting Off The Turf Where My Husband And I Might Be Rivals. We Were Both Working In Fiction... So I Look Back And I See That I Consciously Vacated The Contested Ground.

At The Time It Seemed Like A Natural Development Of My Interest In What Was Going On Around Me In Society.

I Think Some People Wished I'd Kept Myself Out Of The Book. But I Kind Of Insist On It Because I Want The Reader To Share My Engagement With The Material, If You Like, Not Pretend That I'm Doing It Completely Intellectually.

Now, I - For Several Years While I Was Researching This Book, I Felt Quite Obsessed By Thoughts About Sentencing, Punishment, How Judges Arrive At Their Decisions.