In the early 1990s most of my energy was devoted to writing What a Carve Up!, while also doing some arts journalism – mainly for the Guardian, The Wire and the Sunday Times. I had no advance (or contract) for the novel, and the journalism was not especially well-paid, so money was a problem. It was therefore a great blessing when Bloomsbury approached me to write a book about Humphrey Bogart for what seemed to me quite a generous flat fee.

The brief was very simple. A picture researcher, Juliet Brightmore, had assembled a collection of some 200 photographs, and I was to write a 30,000-word text to go with them, tracing the story of Bogart’s life and adding some critical assessment of the films. Not all the films were easy to see, as this was in the days before streaming video or even DVDs. I managed to buy about a dozen of Bogart’s films on VHS, viewed some more on a Steenbeck machine at the BFI in Stephen Street, London, caught a few more on television and either wrote about the others from memory or never saw them at all. The writing and research took about three months altogether.

It’s not a book with which I feel a strong personal connection – even the subtitle, Take It and Like It, was dreamed up not by me but by the editor, David Reynolds – but it was a vital commission, at the time, which enabled me to continue with the writing of What a Carve Up!.