You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.

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• Justin Cartwright:

  I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same

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• Justin Cartwright:

  Consciousness - that, to me, is the theme of the modern novel.

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• Justin Cartwright:

  So often in English fiction, people are either upper-class twits, or else they're knockabouts, less

• Justin Cartwright:

  It's true that all my novels have been versions of myself to some degree.