'Earlier generations had things much worse'

‘One of the virtues of writing historical fiction is to remind yourself that earlier generations had things much worse. The Blitz. The First world War. The English Civil War. The Great Fire of London. The Plague. I was born in the 1950s, which is to have won God's lottery, really. It meant you could live a life of 60 or 70 years without having to put on a uniform and fight. But that is a rarity in human history unfortunately and what we're seeing now is far more like normality.'

Robert Harris, author of 14 bestselling novels, including just-published Act of Oblivion, Fatherland, Enigma, Pompeii and The Cicero Trilogy, in the Sunday Times Culture.