Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. Towns and cities, too, which always retain the ghost of their earlier incarnations beneath today's concrete and glass.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.