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I've always been a history lover. I've spent a lot of recreational time walking around historical castles and estates, in Britain and Europe, and so I know what the real thing looks like.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.

I've been reading a lot of books on history, and watching a lot of educational TV. Wikipedia too, even though it is not reliable.

I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.

With historicals, the research is half the fun. Contemporaries are especially easy. People are right out there in front of you; you meet them every day. You can concentrate wholly on the story and characters.

I grew up under the spell of London. Illustrator Kerry Lee's evocative 1950 wall map of the city hung above our breakfast table at home in Canada. Over my corn flakes, I traced the capital's high roads and medieval alleys.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.