I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.
I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.
People die, but money never does.
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements.
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are.
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmothers since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years.
