I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I'm not a historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.

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.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.