But who knows their own child? You know bits - certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite right too. You give birth to them. You do not design them.

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

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

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.

The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster.