Raf's refusal to marry Zara is regarded by everyone around him as a betrayal (which, in social terms it is) but Raf knows Zara doesn't want to marry him and so refuses to marry her. What Raf doesn't understand, of course, is what damage this will do to Zara and her family.

She needs Raf for protection. Only, to be honest, Raf's own position is not much better. He has the al-Mansur name (always useful), but no money, his dead aunt had numerous enemies and being the son of the Emir of Tunis (bastard or otherwise) is not unalloyed joy. Depending on who one believes, the Emir is best known for:
his insanity, which Raf might have inherited;
surrounding himself with psychotic teenage guards, all female;
living in the desert as far away from 'civilisation' as possible;
refusing to sign the UN treaty banning genetic engineering.
It is the last of these which has led to Emir Moncef's isolation from the West and forced his country to live under the constant threat of economic sanctions or war. (Think Gadaffi or Castro.) Being seen to be close to his son is not necessarily a good idea. Especially given the rumours about Raf being hit man for the Sublime Porte, ruler of the Ottoman empire.

I have a strong feeling, from reading contemporary newspapers, that no one expected the collapse of the numerous German kingdoms that made up Wilhelm's empire or the complete break up of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires. At least not until very late in the day. In fact, I think that our version of Europe was the unlikely one, driven probably by implications of the break up of Russia.

We live in a world where Capitalism has won (for the foreseeable future). Where, as I read in a paper this morning, 'economic improvements' in the Ukraine are expected to lead to rising unemployment, social unrest and massive increases in poverty that is already dire. For much of the last century Communism provided a counter-weight, with wars being fought by proxy across Africa, South America and the Far East. None of this, I think, was an obvious future to anyone standing at the start of the twentieth century. We now stand at the start of the twenty-first and, in a twist of history bizarre enough to stun thinkers of the Enlightenment, we're back to fighting wars, making alliances and settling foreign policy on the basis of religion.

Fifty years ago most intelligent people would have told you that religion was dead, except at a personal level where it remained a contract between one person and his/her belief. Now religion is the new religion. The world is splitting alone religious lines.

Add to which, from an authorial point of view, it's easier to reveal a culture or world to readers if your hero/heroine is having that world revealed to him at the same time. Pashazade and Effendi are mysteries and one of the mysteries that needs to be unravelled in the world in which Raf lives. Besides, I'm bored sick with world-weary hacks stumbling into situations and solving them without needing to learn the local word for bread!

Time has the same effect. I'm no more the person I was ten years ago than I'll be the same person as now ten years hence. And how we behave often depends on to whom we're talking. This is most true in adolescence, when the world is a bit brighter and life's wounds are slightly more raw. A teenager can be a drunker brawler with his mates, a spoiled child with his parents, a sensitive lover with his girlfriend and a kind and respectful young man with his grandmother. (Or all of those could be reversed.)

As a child I watched adults behave one way to children and quite another to adults, and within that division, behave differently to different children and ditto to different adults. And after a while of wondering with was the real person I realised they all were. We're multiple selves.

Because of this, quite apart from being whoever society, genetic disposition and experience make us, we're whoever we make ourselves. This is the theme of most of my novels. Who we make ourselves, how we protect that self from the compromises that life demands. I'm not sure I really understand it. All I know is that most people of my parents generation knew instinctively who they were. Many people of my own don't.

Change, if it came, was often forced by events outside. Plagues, conscription, wars. That said, in a world with fewer people and slowing exchange of information, many did escape themselves, travelling overseas as emigrants to become someone else.

As for our own identities, we've always defined ourselves in relation to other things, by our countries, class, political or religious beliefs, but these are mostly fragmenting and it is this fluidity that allows the manufacture of facts and history. We've lost long-term memory to the point that a politician can stand up and say, 'Five this years ago this happened,' and no one stands up to say, 'Well, actually, no it didn't. You made that up.'

What I'm writing are mystery novels set in an alternative universe in what happens to be the future. As far as my characters are concerned theirs is the only possible world and the time they live is now, nothing else. Murders happen, crimes get committed, someone has to solve them or pick up the pieces.

But, to be honest, I'm in the middle of finishing Felaheen, the third Ashraf Bey novel, and so I'm mostly re-reading comfort books, my favourite being Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, about Satan disguised as a black cat wandering Moscow, intercut with interludes between Christ and Pontius Pilate with a migraine. It's a phenomenal, dazzling work of repressed fury and one that, as a teenager, taught me fantastic fiction can be political, hard edged and say far more than many serious novels.