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Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.

I was sick and tired of reading other people's epigraphs. They all seemed to be in ancient Greek, middle French or, when they were translated, they never seemed to relate to the book at hand. Basically, they seemed to be there just to baffle you and to impress you with how smart the writer is.

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

I have friends who read my books in Greek.

I love Shakespeare and the Greeks - learned a lot studying them at one time.

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.