As well as being distressed by what was happening in Africa from the 1980s onwards, I also became increasingly distrustful of the Marxian 'social science' that had been very influential on my African work. In fact, the more I thought about Marx, and about my own experience doing 'social science' research - not only in Africa, but in Russia and Latin America too - the more doubts I had that Marxism was any kind of 'objective' social science. I increasingly came to think that Marxists, and political radicals generally, have gained little and lost a lot from claiming to be scientists. Indeed I now think that radical politics generally has suffered enormously from trying to put 'science' where ethics and philosophy should be. I got a lot of these notions from a great, eccentric Austrian philosophical genius called Ludwig Wittgenstein, and used them to attempt a complete philosophical reconstruction of Marxism.

In more recent years I have also written about Wittgenstein himself   - and especially about the profound implications of his thought for the study of people. Indeed it was Wittgenstein who first got me interested in writing fiction. The first fiction I wrote was a play about Wittgenstein himself. But more importantly it was his philosophy that first suggested to me that there are things about people that are far better said through fiction and drama than through 'objective', 'impersonal' academic writing. Having written An Impossible Honesty , a play loosely based on Wittgenstein's own life, I went on to write comic plays about Karl Marx and Paul Gascoigne.