Rather thrillingly – very thrillingly – I’ve been given an OBE (“for services to literature and drama”). It actually made the front page of our local paper here in Wales, the Powys County Times, underneath photographs of the recent Tractor Rally. Most novelists I know feel like imposters – we create characters who don’t exist and expect people to believe in them; one day somebody’s going to call our bluff. So it’s particularly gratifying to have such a grown-up recognition of what I do for a living. Because, of course, the imagination is the point of everything.

Some things are so bizarre, however, that you couldn’t make them up because nobody would believe them. The tragi-comedy of “Tulip Fever”, my disaster movie, took another turn when the Weinstein revelations destroyed any …