Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.