Anthony Beevor

I write in this barn because there’s plenty of space, there’s plenty of room for bookshelves so everything’s available and above all there is also a ping pong table which is perfect as a map table, one can spread out the maps.  And also it is very silent and it’s very easy to concentrate here.

The bulk of the work on all of my books is research.  The book on D-Day and the Battle for Normandy required … needless to say a huge amount of research in many countries and basically in archives.  But also there was a huge amount of material particularly of diaries and letters which had become available over the last 10, 15 years and that gave an extraordinary richness of contemporary material which was entirely reliable.

Well I’m in the very, very early stage now of writing my next book which is a general history of the whole of the second World War and I’m afraid it’s going to be a very large book, a real wrist breaker. But this is still very much the preparatory stage of writing, of getting the skeleton structure in place and then you can start allocating the material chapter by chapter.  But that’s the wonder of the computer as opposed to the old days, the old card indexes because you can immediately copy your material across from your archive files or whatever to the skeleton chapters without losing anything.  And it makes a huge difference, I think a book like this would take at least another two to three years if it was still using the old technology. 

Well some people seem to assume that you know you write 3,000 words a day and then play golf in the afternoon or anything like that but I think that was very much writers of the 1930s.  Yes self-discipline is important and particularly with non-fiction there is no excuse of having a writer’s block or anything like that, you’ve just got to get on with the work.  And there’s always material you can be doing whether it’s reading or just getting on with the writing and the preparation.

I don’t have sort of objects or pictures necessarily for inspiration.  There’s quite an amusing poster over there which my Russian Colleague Ludberv Naraderav gave me, basically it’s an anti-alcohol advertisement during the Soviet Regime saying Nyet!   There is also a day bed which is a very vital piece of equipment I think for any writer so that if you are feeling sleepy slightly in the afternoon it’s much better just to have a quick snooze and then get back to work rather than just feeling dozy the whole time.

The desk that I work at used to belong to my wife’s grandfather who wrote a wonderful biography, some people say that it’s the most beautifully written biography, short biography in the English language and I hope that I have a little bit of inspiration from that, I don’t know.