If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

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

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

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.

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