Home 5 News 5 An Obituary on A Woman Plotting Rockets’ Path Inspired Robert Harris’ V2

An Obituary on A Woman Plotting Rockets’ Path Inspired Robert Harris’ V2

by | Jul 6, 2021 | News

Robert Harris, the famous author of 14 novels including the bestselling Fatherland, the Cicero trilogy, and Enigma, said an obituary in the Times about a woman who had to plot the path of rockets in Belgium, inspired his latest second world war thriller, V2.

‘I thought she sounded like an interesting character, no more than that. I was attracted to the story because of Brexit, funnily enough. The idea that one European power had occupied another to fire ballistic missiles at a third struck me as amazing,’ Harris told the Guardian.

‘I read a book by Eileen Younghusband, who was one of those looking for rocket bases. She claimed they’d identified two bases that had been destroyed by RAF, and that their operation beat the V2s. So, the sort of book I thought I was going to write became something else, a book about futility, and perhaps more interesting because of that,’ he added.

Harris, who also wrote the screenplays for the films of his novels, The Ghost, filmed as The Ghost Writer, and An Officer and a Spy, is currently writing a novel about the English civil war, and for this purpose is reading Pepys’s diary, the speeches of Oliver Cromwell and Carlyle’s letters.

He is generally interested in political events and the universality of political impulses, from Cicero’s Rome to 19th-century France to Russia, Germany, wherever the same quest for power exists.

Talking about how the Covid-19 lockdown changed his writing habits, Harris said he usually starts a book on the 15th of January and finishes it on the 15th of June, but the lockdown hit while he was writing his book.

‘I’ve realised over the years that a lot of writing is done in the subconscious. And to stimulate the subconscious you need to relax. You need to see friends, go out, go to the theatre. When you can’t do that, the mind becomes a very strange place. I couldn’t work for more than three or four hours a day. I had to stop at noon,’ he explained.

Harris was previously a journalist, serving as political editor of the Observer. He now lives in Berkshire with his wife. He has four children.

Source: The Guardian

Recent News

17Jul
Penguin Supports Winn Amid Controversy

Penguin Supports Winn Amid Controversy

Penguin said release date of On Winter Hill would be changed in order to ‘support the author’ after allegations that Raynor Winn lied in her bestselling memoir. Author Raynor Winn’s new book has been delayed because questions about her bestselling work The Salt Path have caused her and her husband “considerable distress”, her publisher has […]

17Jul
Farshore  Revives ‘Portly the Otter’

Farshore Revives ‘Portly the Otter’

HarperCollins’ children’s imprint Farshore has acquired The Adventures of Portly the Otter: Untold Tales from the Wind in the Willows by award-winning children’s author M. G. Leonard. The book of exciting spin-off stories from the much-loved classic The Wind in the Willows, written by Kenneth Grahame and illustrated by E.H. Shepard, will publish in March […]

16Jul
Firefinch to Debut in 2026 with Star Authors

Firefinch to Debut in 2026 with Star Authors

Publishing veteran Kate Parkin, who worked for Random House and was most recently MD of the adult publishing division at Bonnier Books UK, is launching a new independent publishing house, Firefinch.  It is a co-venture with her Bonnier colleague Margaret Stead who was Bonnier publisher. Among the authors who are making the jump with them […]

Related Posts

Farshore  Revives ‘Portly the Otter’

Farshore Revives ‘Portly the Otter’

HarperCollins’ children’s imprint Farshore has acquired The Adventures of Portly the Otter: Untold Tales from the Wind in the Willows by award-winning children’s author M. G. Leonard. The book of exciting spin-off stories from the much-loved classic The Wind in the...

Firefinch to Debut in 2026 with Star Authors

Firefinch to Debut in 2026 with Star Authors

Publishing veteran Kate Parkin, who worked for Random House and was most recently MD of the adult publishing division at Bonnier Books UK, is launching a new independent publishing house, Firefinch.  It is a co-venture with her Bonnier colleague Margaret Stead who was...

Al Faya: Where History Took Its First Steps on the Sands of the Desert

Al Faya: Where History Took Its First Steps on the Sands of the Desert

In a timeless moment etched into the memory of human heritage, the sun of Sharjah rose once again on the map of the world, this time through the gateway of deep history. At its recently concluded 47th session in Paris, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee officially...

Previous Next
Close
Test Caption
Test Description goes like this