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 past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

And in another year everything will be different yet again. It is always like that, and always will be; you are forever standing on the brink, in a place where you cannot see ahead; there is nothing of which to be certain except what lies behind. This should be terrifying, but somehow it is not.

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

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.