I rather like getting away from fiction.

I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.

We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.

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

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys.