There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable..

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children..

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

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, ….

The idea that memory is linear is nonsense. What we have in our heads is a collection of frames. As to time itself-can it be linear when all these sn….

All history, of course, is the history of wars..

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction a….

The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained s….

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country h….

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment w….

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation..

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….

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms..

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

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

I rather like getting away from fiction..

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distractio….

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

In old age, you realise that while you're divided from your youth by decades, you can close your eyes and summon it at will. As a writer it puts one ….

I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dange….

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