When I was younger I used to get my best writing done at night, but now it has to be during the day. I usually finish work at half past seven, then go back to the house to open a bottle of wine, have dinner, and then read or watch television.

If you smash a city when you're trying to capture it, you actually end up providing the perfect terrain for the defenders while blocking the access for your own armoured vehicles.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.

I can't envisage stopping writing.

When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.