Barry Unsworth

I like the condition of being an outsider, just passing through.

I'm not a biographer, I'm a novelist.

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn.

All my fiction starts from a feeling of unique perception, the pressure of a secret, a story that needs to be told.

As I wrote I began to see more strongly that there were inescapable analogies. You couldn't really live through the '80s without feeling how crass and distasteful some of the economic doctrines were. The slave trade is a perfect model for that kind of total devotion to the profit motive without reckoning the human consequences.

Angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognise each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time and distance.

But whatever the ramifications, whatever turns the path takes, the beginning is always there, in a particular moment, a particular point of access.

In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes.