Robert Harris: Extracting drama from the frisson of human interaction

Robert Harris never meant to write novels. A political journalist, who, at 30, moved from the BBC to become political editor of the Observer, he enjoyed writing longer pieces; and between 1982 and 1990, he penned five works of non-fiction.

However, when he wanted to write a book imagining what would have happened had Hitler won the second world war, he hit a barrier.

“The tools of non-fiction were insufficient to allow me to express what I wanted to say; it could only be done imaginatively,” he tells me over coffee in Dublin.