I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could help protect one of those from destruction, maybe that would be enough. Maybe it would be more than most people do.

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires.

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear.

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that.

Еhere's no doubt at all that the Norman conquest led to the hugely concentrated land ownership patterns that we still see in Britain today. Some of Britain's biggest landowners are still direct descendants of Norman barons. And given the impact that Britain has had on the world over the past few hundred years, you could perhaps say this was a global issue. History is always with us.

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect.