Robert Harris
Robert Harris
British author, journalist, and BBC reporter who became known for his best-selling historical novel, Fatherland. The work is a thriller set during World War II.
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 March 1957
crazy thinking long
I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics - especially if you're there for a long time.
portraits would-be rich
If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.
thinking anxiety zenith
I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety.
events
History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.
thinking way goes-on
Everyone thinks politics will just go on the way it is. I don't agree.
party personality way
In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.
careers flukes unexpected
My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.
storytelling narcotics
Storytelling has a narcotic power.
victory events remorseless
Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.
regret able jokes
My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.
influence huge
Orwell has always been a huge influence on me.
thinking leader scary
One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.
thinking talking talking-to-yourself
You find out what you think by talking to yourself.
work-out history together
Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.