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.

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.

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

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

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.

I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county structures, though hollowed out in many ways, are a direct result of what happened in 1066.

A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history.