You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time.

It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.

I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

I think we continually need to understand how important an event the war was - how defining, how central to who we are. Everything that came before it led up to it, and everything of importance to this country - at least up to 1940 - was a consequence of it. Even now there's an echo of the war, however faint, in almost everyone's life.

Wynton told us that Miles sold out, just wanted to make more money, just wanted to sell more records. I don't believe that Miles sold out but I'm not in a position to say.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.