 His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless.In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative.Twenty years ago, in "Zdt" and "The Pandora Option", he wrote on food as a new weapon in the armoury of the superpowers and in the early 1990s ("Sand Blind"), with the capacity of those same superpowers to fabricate wars in the interests of their technologies and consumer needs.