Though it's marvelously entertaining, and I had fantastic fun writing the book, it's not terribly easily, the material, and it's not all that familiar...although we think it is familiar. The processes of the wonderful narratives are very intricate. It's about the charm - the spellbinding charm - of ingenuity, and it's not so easy to remember the plots or the structure or even the names.

Although the stories are very present in my book, and very present in my mind, what I was most interested in was the question of why it had attracted such a following in the 18th Century. It's less mysterious that it attracted a following in the Romantic period, and in the 19th Century, but the early 18th Century when the Rationalists fell in love with it...that was mysterious. What I wanted to look at was the forms of enchantment.

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.

I am not a great believer in dialectical struggle. I am much more of a fusion person. I see it as a dialogue, or trialogue, or polylogue: many, many, many voices, going back a long way. The cultural picture is much more mutually enriching at many different levels, manufacturers...absolutely, design and calligraphy. It's an amazing amount of cross-interests between people.

It seemed to me to be a parable of the exchange of goods, rather Marxist in some ways, in the new world of global forces. What the forgers do is write the brand name to try and change it, and it works! Loads of people buy fake Prada handbags, or Chanel sunglasses; they've been changed. They have been truly, really changed.

The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of women's voices, in the collecting and arrangement of these stories, and yet the message of so many of them is incredibly misogynist. I was very puzzled by that, and that book explores that contradiction.