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

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

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

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a nano-level as we lie back in our hammocks, attended by our robot servants. I don't believe a word of it, and I'm not sure many of us do.

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

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.

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action.