When I want to read a book, I write one. So wrote the 19th century politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli - Washington Irving said something very similar - and its a maxim which Ive adopted as my own. Almost all of the writing Ive done over many years has been based on wanting to read a book on a particular subject - a book which research told me didnt currently seem to exist. Carrying the Torch, like all my other books to date, was born out of the desire to read a good book on an interesting subject: finding nothing available that quite matched up to my expectations, I decided to write it myself. I wanted a good, general book about the phenomenon of unrequited love in the worlds art, how important a theme it has been in novels, poems, music and film for so long, why artists keep coming back to it again and again, what it actually is, what it feels like and how it might be explained and so forth. I like to think that thats the book Ive written. All the world loves a lover and most people, whether they openly admit it or not (and that includes a great many men!) love a good love story: as I make clear in the book, it doesnt seem to matter if the story has a tragic or at least unhappy ending, we dont enjoy it any less and may even enjoy it all the more, as the popularity of weepies in book or film form attests

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