Perhaps I Shall Not Write My Account

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 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.

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.

Mythology Is Much Better Stuff Than History. It Has Form; Logic; A Message.

The Place Didn't Look The Same But It Felt The Same; Sensations Clutched And Transformed Me. I Stood Outside Some Concrete And Plate-glass Tower-block, Picked A Handful Of Eucalyptus Leaves From A Branch, Crushed Them In My Hand, Smelt, And Tears Came To My Eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, On A Pavement Awash With Packaged American Matrons, Crying Not In Grief But In Wonder That Nothing Is Ever Lost, That Everything Can Be Retrieved, That A Lifetime Is Not Linear But Instant. That, Inside The Head, Everything Happens At Once.