I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.

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

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

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.

If we had not met, that day, I think I would have imagined you somehow.