24 April 2023
When I admit Ken Follett to the Zoom, he is not in front of his computer but at the other end of his office, his back to me. And it is a long way across as-at least from my depth of field-his office is sizeable. But cosy: late Victorian edging to Arts and Crafts furnishings, wallpaper of warming yellow and red, soft lighting. The seconds tick on and still he does not turn and I half-wonder if this is a sort of power play to disconcert an interlocutor, the kind of device the scheming Bishop Waleran Bigod, one of the main villains in Follett's first Kingsbridge novel The Pillars of the Earth, might employ.
