A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. I think that kind of thing is an abuse of history..

The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind tu….

I’m increasingly attracted by the idea that there can be at least small pockets where life and character and beauty and meaning continue. If I could ….

Certainly our cultural fallback position seems to be that our technologies will get us out of everything they have got us into. That looks like a mag….

In most novels, the landscape, or the place, in which the story takes part is simply a backdrop to the human action..

Hope, like despair, is something of a distraction: it gets in the way of a clear view of the horizon..

Еhere's no doubt at all that the Norman conquest led to the hugely concentrated land ownership patterns that we still see in Britain today. Some of B….

The world we are in today is likely to end catastrophically, as many other human worlds have done before..

What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look ….

We like to think that the fate of the Earth and the fate of human worlds are the same thing, but we're not as important as that..

It's always hard for an author to determine his own intentions, especially in retrospect..

We enjoy telling ourselves that we will soon be gods, masters of the planet, manipulating the genes of living creatures and rebuilding the world at a….

"Romanticizing the past" is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future..

I think we take the history we want to take in order to back up the stories we want to hear..

I do think that the legacy of the Norman conquest is still strong in Britain. Our hereditary monarchy, our established church, our ancient county str….