It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past.
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
