I felt that such a wide canvas was necessary to tell the story that it contains, and also to put the fall of the western Roman Empire into proper perspective. Why did you pick this particular time period-the first millennium A.D.-as your book’s focus? For me, that’s the great intellectual excitement in the mode of working: it’s like a huge cryptic crossword puzzle with lots of bad and incomplete clues. The available materials are always massively incomplete and you’re always having to think of ways of deriving some kind of reasonably likely answer from intractable data. Because of the nature of the evidence, you can never just go away and look up the answer you're after in some dusty archive.
It’s not only the subject matter which is so interesting to me, but also-I found-the whole way of working. The Roman ones were totally astonishing even to my very young eyes for the quality of workmanship and the overwhelming scale of it all.
My mother was a great history nut, so we always visited a lot of ancient sites (only within the U.K., in fact my parents were classic English and didn’t like it “abroad”). My original interest in things Roman goes back a long way into childhood.
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