You can't write about the past and ignore religion. It was such a fundamental, mind-shaping, driving force for pre-modern societies. I'm very interested in what religion does to us - its capacity to create love and empathy or hatred and violence.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.

Even the classics that we read to our young children are full of wolves' fangs and burning ovens and bloody feet and ice shards piercing hearts. Even the New Testament climaxes with an act of unspeakable torture. Might as well just read to our kids from the Amnesty Annual Report and be done with it.

Despair is a cavern beneath our feet and we teeter on its very brink.