Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.

If they would all sleep all the time she wouldn't mind being their mother.

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere - 1730 to around 1870 is the most interesting period.

I feel as if I’m waiting for something dreadful to happen, and then I realize it already has.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

Become such as you are, having learned what that is.