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

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.

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

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a magical thinking to me, but we don't really have a better idea.

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon.

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