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

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

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

People die, but money never does.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present.

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.