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 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.

For me, reading is my essential palliative, my daily fix.

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

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.

In the frozen stone of the cathedrals of Europe there co-exist the Apostles, Christ and Mary, lambs, fish, gryphons, dragons, sea-serpents and the faces of men with leaves for hair. I approve of that liberality of mind.

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

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.

A stone has been cast into the reliable immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery.

I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles – tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.