How did you start writing? (Nicola P., Dorset.)

It was all a bit of an accident. I was on holiday in 1987. Mrs. Thatcher had just been horrid to me during the recent election campaign and I was licking my wounds. I was also bored, so sat down beside the swimming pool one afternoon with a bottle of wine, a pad and a pencil and let my mind wander. Twenty-four hours later I had the outline plot of what was to become House of Cards, and when I got home I decided to find out whether I could do all the bits in between. I never intended to be a writer - it was one of life's great cock-ups - but, hell, I could still be commuting.

What was the inspiration for Francis Urquhart? (Mark P., Wimbledon)

I had come to the conclusion in 1987 that Mrs. Thatcher wouldn't last forever as Prime Minister - indeed, Willie Whitelaw, her deputy, had said as much to me. In any event, it was clear that the next few years were going to be very turbulent years in politics, with skulduggery, treachery and thwarted ambition served up for breakfast. That became the background for House of Cards and the character of Francis Urquhart. I'm sad to say that the entire concept derives from his initials. FU.

Why did you start writing about Winston Churchill? (Dan, Chicago)

It happened over a pub lunch with two great friends, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, two fellow writers who have created so many wonderful television series. We started discussing the Old Man, and something they said about a telegram that went missing on the day he became Prime Minister intrigued me. I started to read more deeply, I became hooked - even when I discovered that the missing telegram didn't exist. But what I found was even more enticing. I stumbled across the fact that he had spent one of the most significant days in British history at his home at Chartwell with the Soviet spy Guy Burgess. This fact was ignored by the formal historians - why? What did it mean? What did they discuss? I was hooked. I set aside the book I was writing and, in its place, Winston's War was born.

But aren't historical novels simply a dumb man's history? (Phil P., Manchester)

Well, I suppose some historical novels might be. But good ones can teach you more about history than many formal text books. Historians tend to start from what a man did. They work their way from the outside of the character in. A novelist works in precisely the opposite direction - from the inside out. A novelist first asks not what a man or woman did, but why he or she did it. Historians build their work on the known facts - but the records are often fragmentary and incomplete. A novelist uses intuition and experience, as all of us do in everyday life, to fill in the gaps and capture a more complete understanding. Far from being a dumb man's history, I think that good historical novels can bring a period to light and provide more understanding than any formal history. Anyway, that's my ambition for my books.

What do you do in your spare time? (Lucy V., Chelsea)

What spare time? But if I ever do get a moment, I climb up my family tree. When I was sixteen I began to realise that almost everything I'd ever been told about my grandparents was a web of lies. So I started to dig, and uncovered all sorts of uncomfortable but compelling truths. It has helped me to understand my parents and therefore myself very much better, and through these searches I've got to know many new friends and places. So if you have any sort of connections with the Dobbs family, particularly if those roots are in Ireland, please get in touch. We may be family.