For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.