R. F. Foster

So it's those things, you know, the unlikely oddities that I'm after.

I don't truly believe in history in the way historians do, even though my closest friend nearly is an historian, Roy Foster.

I'm more... interested in saying what einstein has to say about actual time that past present and future are contained in this entity this four-dimensional entity called space-time so i my suspicion is and maybe even my disreputable um belief is that i that if i if i sit still enough if I read enough books and forget enough books, I can go back in the context of a novel to say Tennyson born in 1840 and somehow be there.

And I'm actually, you know, I'm suggesting disgracefully that this is actually the thing itself.

No, you certainly don't want to be reading a book.

I mean, writing and reading, as I say, are quite recent.

And when we have the example now of the, you know, the Odyssey, this new film of the Odyssey, uh, and also my other friend Daniel, Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation of the Odyssey.

And I mean, nobody even knows really how many homers there were, whether it was the one homer, whether it was a woman really, or anything like that.