Robert Harris
Robert Harris
British author, journalist, and BBC reporter who became known for his best-selling historical novel, Fatherland. The work is a thriller set during World War II.
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 March 1957
acquiring benefit double gains might perspective time
One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present.
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Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later.
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I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.
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If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And the first time you see them, they look one way. But then time changes, the pattern of light shifts. Maybe you've moved slightly, your perspective has changed. The mountains are the same, but they look very different.
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It is perseverance, and not genius that takes a man to the top. Rome is full of unrecognized geniuses. Only perseverance enables you to move forward in the world.
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In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.
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I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that.
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It was a minor injury. He was running when it happened. We took him to hospital in South Africa because we just wanted to make sure he was okay, and that done, he is now back to work.
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Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then.
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Those two people were swayed more by sympathy and emotion for the family than anything objective. That's my feeling.
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Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
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Black poverty has persisted and become intractable but unless we have some crisis like this, we basically forget about these people -- out of sight, out of mind.
life
There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life.
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I see myself as the literary equivalent of a skilled lathe-operator, or a basket-weaver; a potter, maybe: I make mildly diverting objects that people want to buy.