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I don't know that happy people are interesting to write about - or to read about.

Some authors are quite happy - and have the time - to do it all themselves, which is great.

Happy are those who dwell apart from the harrowing tumults of public life!

The people who read the history books tend to have a natural zeal and are alarmingly well-read.

History often reads as a hard and grim experience. But people are remarkably resilient and funny, even when the going is very hard.

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.

To me, it was a sad fate to have been born into a period and a world where everything was in tip-top order, and the only real excitement was to be found in history books and occasionally also in the paper.