Tom Holland and Robert Harris on eco-radicals and why monarchy matters

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.