TOM HOLLAND: Here’s something I always wonder when I read one of your books. You’ve written novels set in the present, you’ve even written a novel set in the future, but overwhelmingly your fiction is set in past periods, spanning ancient Rome up to the second world war. What is it about the past that appeals most to you as a novelist? The mirror that it holds up to the present or the sense of difference from the way we see the world?
ROBERT HARRIS: I’ve always been very interested in history. Really, but for the accident of having an English teacher who pushed me towards studying English, I would probably have studied history and indeed thought of changing halfway through my course in Cambridge. But it would have meant doing four years. So I didn’t. I’ve always been fascinated by how people lived, with the way societies were organised, with what it might have been like to have been alive in the past. I was born 12 years after the end of the second world war, and it was still a very real thing when I was growing up. I felt the weight of the past in the present as I lived it.
TH: I remember you did an article about it in the Sunday Times in the 1990s. I think it was accompanied by a picture of Hitler with the EU flag. And you made comparisons between Hitler’s plans for Europe and the EU, which in light of what subsequently happened, I thought it was an interesting irony that it should have been you in that article who was making the comparisons. Was that something that you found particularly provocative when you wrote Fatherland?
‘It amuses me that everyone thinks Britain’s relationship with Europe was settled on 23 June 2016’
RH: I wrote Fatherland as a result of writing a book about the Hitler diaries, during which I read a lot of Hitler’s table talk.
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