Any Human Heart writing again of a whole-life view: "I don't think there's anything wrong with going back over territory you've previously covered." Though avowedly not an (auto-)biographical novelist, Boyd acknowledged that personal experiences often subconsciously affect a writer's fiction. As in several of Boyd's novels there are parallels with the author's life: both Boyd and Mountstuart lived in Africa and France, studied at Oxford, worked in literary London and had a taste of New York. Boyd usually splits the creation of a novel into two phases: research and writing. The first phase of "Any Human Heart" took 30 months as he carefully
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