Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.
What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.
I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis.
I get slightly obsessive about working in archives because you don't know what you're going to find. In fact, you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.
I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.
When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.
If you smash a city when you're trying to capture it, you actually end up providing the perfect terrain for the defenders while blocking the access for your own armoured vehicles.
Restorers of paintings and pottery follow a code of conduct in their work to distinguish the original material from what they are adding later.
The power of historical fiction for bad and for good can be immense in shaping consciousness of the past.
I just love the days when you come out of the archives with half a dozen excellent descriptions or poignant accounts of personal experiences.
When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.
The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.
The great help of being in the Army is to understand why are the armies clever in what they describe as emotional intelligence, making soldiers come to terms with the death of comrades by certain rituals.
Alpacas are very endearing, and they all have very different personalities.
The temptation in any approaching crisis or conflict is, because people haven't got a clue what lies ahead, they're always searching into the past for some sort of pattern ... to galvanise the nation or their supporters and put themselves on a pedestal to sound Churchillian or Rooseveltian.
The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.
The vital thing for me is to integrate the history from above with the history from below because only in that way can you show the true consequences of the decisions of Hitler or Stalin or whomever on the ordinary civilians caught up in the battle.
School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.
It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one's got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It's never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn't mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.
Historical truth and the marketing needs of the movie and television industry remain fundamentally incompatible.
