I’m intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person’s life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children’s literature, which I’ve always had, and the feeling that I’d just have a go and see if I could do it.

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

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 with names new to me, I would be starved – probably too starved to go on writing myself.

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 and non-fiction.

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

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

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

Since then, I have just read and read – but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.

I’m not an 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.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

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

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

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

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

Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country.

Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time – and central to the concerns of fiction.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

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

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

We all need a past – that’s where our sense of identity comes from.

We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.

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

I’m intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person’s life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it’s not.

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

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

I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years – first, the house that had been my grandmother’s since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

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.