 In British literature, a sense of place and a sense of geography permeates pretty much everything. It's hard to think of a classic British writer who doesn't use landscape. A writer has got to be so in the tradition of his world. One definition of literature, certainly fiction, I think, is the idea of characters moving across a landscape of some kind. Nearly every story has to be set somewhere. Novels teach you about a place, they teach you to feel and see it differently, and they make places larger. I think, like all readers, I enjoy the process of entering, as it were, another little world, another location, which is not directly my own. I think if I had to choose one thing that characterised British literature, both prose and poetry, I would say it was geography. More widely, I would say landscape. British literature, really, from the earliest year, along with the Anglo-Saxon poetry, although usually about the sea, is about the way environment and emotion are related. What landscape and what place has sort of embedded within it are all of those shared cultural associations. As a writer, when you're looking to connect with a reader, your landscape is a fantastic shortcut. If I take a train north out of Euston, especially, I can't help thinking of Dombie and Son and that famous chapter six and the Great Cutting that goes right through Camden Town, Crimers Hill, dug by Irish navies. You would find the undiscovered country of the nearby, as it were, astonishments on your doorstep where you were least expecting them. But also you would go to distant places and make that difference, that foreignness, that strangeness, somehow comprehensible to yourself and to your reader. And if I read a novel which is set, let's say in South America, where I've never been, there are going to be all kinds of references which will go over the top of my head. But if I get, nonetheless, that feeling of life lived in a locality, then that is authentic for me and that will take me into the book and that will group me. But I was recently reading Dickens and getting such pleasure from the fact that he walks, you know, his characters walk around London. So they talk about sort of walking from Islington to Stretton and you suddenly get an idea of what the 19th century was like because that is some walk. Landscape is a character, is a strong character in a lot of British literature. It's just that we didn't really know until recently how to think about it how weather might bear down on people's lives. I mean, you read the novels of Thomas Hardy, you see that very, very clearly how the heathland might expand or contract people's senses of themselves. George Eliot has a wonderful phrase. She talks about how certain kinds of experience might enlarge the range self has to swim in. I don't write anything until I have encountered what I'm writing about as a character. I will actually sit with water until I feel its personality has communicated to me. Almost every significant rock or landmark has language associated with it, has stories associated with it. We live in a densely historically storiated landscape. How do you find new ways of seeing those, joining those stories up, making songlines as it were, joining place to place, story to story and image to image?