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 believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these snatches of other presents exist at once in your mind? A very elusive and tricky concept, time.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.