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Say something about the circumstances of the writing of A Letter to Daniel
A Letter to Daniel rose from a phone call which came to me when I was based in Hong Kong, from the editor of From our own Correspondent at the BBC. He rang and suggested that I write a piece about the experience of becoming a father while based abroad as a foreign correspondent. At the time I was slightly reluctant to do it and said ring me back in a few days. In the intervening period Daniel came out of hospital and I was at home, doing my best to help Ann with him, and I just sat down and wrote the piece very, very early one morning, just after getting him off to sleep. It was one of those pieces… I think it took me maybe an hour to write, and it just flowed. It just came out. There wasn't very much revision involved, it was very natural.

What was the audience's response to it on the radio?
It was a phenomenal response. Nothing I did before and nothing I've done since in terms of radio broadcasting has elicited the same response. I had hundreds and hundreds of letters from people who'd heard the broadcast, many of them talking about their own experiences of childhood and their experiences of becoming parents, I had one letter from a man who was at the South Pole with the British Antarctic Survey, and he was writing his letter to me by oil lamp in a tent, and talking about his own childhood and what he'd gone through - a lot of people sharing very, very deep personal experience, and I found that quite humbling.

Do you think you were touching on something new writing about this?
One hesitates to say that. It's the account of a universal experience, that's what people responded to, because there were a lot of people who wrote to me who had no children, but everybody had parents, and a very strong element of Letter to Daniel, the particular piece itself, was about the relationship with parents and about how we attempt to repair and understand what happened in our childhoods. I think that helped me, in the many letters that I received, which were from people who'd come to terms with what had happened in their childhood. That helped me along a journey of coming to terms, of understanding.

How do you see the value of individual lives in the context of reporting politics and wider issues - do you think there's a way of approaching that subject?
I think there are different reporters for different kinds of reporting, and I wouldn't want to say that my style, which focuses very much on individuals, is what everybody else should do. That being said, I think a journalism which forgets that great international affairs are fundamentally about people, is a dangerous kind of journalism, because it exists in an abstract. It becomes a debate solely about ideas and policies and forgets that the people at the very end of the scale are human beings. They are the people who have to live with the mistakes made by the politicians, they have to live with the propaganda pushed out by the apologists for different politicians. So in terms of what I do myself, I think there is a singular value in taking down the stories of people's lives - and be very detailed about how one does it. It is easy to look at a huge mass of people and see them as just Africans. It's more important for me to go out and find a particular person to tell the story of their life as a means of bringing the reader into bigger truths.

Is this quite a controversial discussion going on within reporting? Your books and reporting have been extremely well received but attacked in some quarters
We live in a country that is lucky enough not to have known war and civil conflict for half a century. In that context you fill acres of newsprint arguing about the journalism of human involvement, journalism which has emotion in it. There's plenty of time to worry about things like that. The places I go to and report from are not places where people have that luxury, so I tend to pay very little attention to the obsessive navel-gazing which dominates British journalism nowadays. I think we need more reporting, we need more people going out and finding stories, rather than listening to each other's opinions in a very narrow metropolitan elite.

Did the birth of Daniel affect your professional values?
It did. It made me conspicuously less willing to risk my life. I think there is a kind of moral contract you make. It's implicit in the whole business of becoming a father and staying in a family that you are around, you will be around for your child to grow up, that you will be a presence in their life, and I don't think it's possible to put yourself in positions of danger repeatedly and live up to the bonds of that contract. Therefore it has actually changed how I actually do my job. It has also changed hugely how I see people. I think I am inclined to be a little less judgmental - more inclined to stand back and think about things and less inclined to rush into swift moral judgements about people.

How important to you was your book about Rwanda?
Letter to Daniel marked a defining moment in my personal life. The book on Rwanda, The Season of Blood, is an attempt to explain and to convey to people what was without a shadow of a doubt the defining moment in my professional life. Covering a genocide was quite unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I had been to war before. I'd seen war in Angola, I'd seen the conflict in the South African townships, I'd spent a long long time in Northern Ireland, but nothing prepared me for the reality of genocide. The book, The Season of Blood, is very much an eye witness account, a day by day account of what it was like to travel through that landscape of unimaginable slaughter, to come to terms with the idea that people would want to exterminate an entire ethnic group. Now you could say, well surely after the Holocaust we shouldn't be surprised, we shouldn't struggle to understand something like that but I can assure you, as the book tries to convey in pretty vivid terms, it is, to put it mildly, difficult to understand.

Did writing the book help to sort that out, was it a cathartic experience?
I think writing The Season of Blood was a very important process for me, because I needed to set down precisely what happened - obviously for a reading public, but also critically to try and understand it myself. I would say about Rwanda that with me it's a work in progress. I go back there every year now, almost. I keep going back to the people who are featured in The Season of Blood and talking to them, trying to see what has happened to their lives. I suspect when I'm a very old man I'll still be asking the very fundamental question of how human beings are capable of rising up and slaughtering people that they live beside quite happily for generations, why are men and women capable to murdering defenceless little children. Perhaps the answer to that lies somewhere in the soul of Man, and it's not one that is comfortable to contemplate.

You recently undertook a tour of the poorest areas in Britain, from which your new paperback A Stranger's Eye emerged. How did witnessing the deprivation make you feel - pessimistic, or do you think there are possibilities for change and improvement?
I think what makes me pessimistic is the sort of gulf of experience that exists, and that in our political and our journalistic class, most people have no idea how those describe as socially excluded actually live. There are stunts from time to time in which a politician will spend a week living in a council flat with a camera crew following him around, but that doesn't count for a real experience or understanding of how people live. So there is that gulf of experience. What makes me more hopeful is the evidence that I found of people trying to encourage a civil society. It is small things like the neighbourhood and residents' groups, for example in Falmouth on the Beacon Estate, which I describe in A Stranger's Eye. They had remarkable success in reducing the rates of things like post-natal depression, crime, the incidence of drug abuse, because there is now a Residents' Association which goes around and listens to people's concerns, and allows people to feel that they have a voice.

Are there any books about reporting or books of memoirs that are particular favourites of yours that you would like to recommend?
I adore a book by Edward Behr which is called Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English [out of print]. A frightful title, but it is what he says he heard a reporter asking in the Congo back in the early 1960's. I loved the book because it's honest, and it steers clear of the kind of piety and self-promotion which infects so many journalistic memoirs. It's a beautiful book and it's very, very funny. The key thing to remember about the whole business of being a foreign correspondent is that it is possible in the midst of tragedy and sorrow (and we witness a great deal of that) to believe in a kind of hopeful future. Now Rwanda challenged that for me. Edward Behr, who went right through the second world war, who went through Algeria, Congo and Vietnam, he managed to hold on to a fundamental optimism about human beings and I still do. You'd go mad if you took the other route.

The memoir that strikes me as probably the most powerful that I've ever read is a book by Nadia Mandelstam, the wife of Osip Mandelstam the poet, called Hope Against Hope [Harvill Press, £12]. Her account of their experience under the Stalinist tyranny is really moving and I don't think that I could find a more powerful book in the English language. Her last letter to her husband is written into the emptiness after he has disappeared. She is almost convinced that he is dead and she knows he won't receive the letter. I would recommend it to anyone - read it and it will stop your heart.

Also Raymond Carver, American short story writer and poet, is somebody who has influenced my writing and profoundly influenced my personal life. I came to him through his poetry - a book called Ultramarine, or In a Marine Light, followed by A New Path to the Waterfall [all titles published in All of us, Harvill Press]. There is a simplicity which belies a great intelligence in his work and a real humanity in what he has to say. The poem that he wrote towards the end of his life when he was dying from cancer - and this was after a life of wreckage, caused by alcoholism, the last ten to fifteen years of which he'd managed to turn around and live in a sober way - enjoyed massive success. Ray says 'And did you get what you wanted from this life even so?' 'I did.' 'And what did you want?' 'To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.' Magnificent.