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
thinking years issues
Humans have changed little over time. We think we've invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism.
thinking way goes-on
Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.
crazy thinking long
I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics - especially if you're there for a long time.
thinking anxiety zenith
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
thinking leader scary
One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.
thinking talking talking-to-yourself
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
flower writing thinking
It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.
lives marine novels operative people sorts
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.
africa hospital minor running south sure took
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.
attitude change fling hands holding men mores quite social time
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.
emotion emotions family people swayed sympathy
Those two people were swayed more by sympathy and emotion for the family than anything objective. That's my feeling.
beyond luxury spend within
Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
basically black crisis forget people poverty unless
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.