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

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.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

People die, but money never does.

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

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.