I've felt like copying that passage and sending it to some of the reviewers who've commented on the coldness of Maskell as a character. But I did make significant changes. I made Maskell an Irishman, and in the usual shameless way of fiction writers, I took the boyhood of the poet MacNeice and given it to Maskell. I suppose I gave Maskell an Irish background so that I could avoid the work of having to inhabit the skin of an Englishman. I felt more relaxed writing from an Irish perspective.
Historical fiction's a funny thing.
You take the facts, as I did in novels based on the lives of Copernicus and Kepler, and put them into a melting pot, boil them down with the fiction, and in the end sometimes even I can't tell which is which in the finished story. It's a shameless business, playing fast and loose with facts about people's lives, but I like to think that the process achieves a kind of illumination of character.