Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.

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.

I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

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