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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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