When was the first time in your career that you made substantial use of archive material?
At university I studied the history of philosophy of law – an incredibly wide-ranging topic. I wrote dissertations on subjects as diverse as the trial of the former SS chief Klaus Barbie in the 1980s, and South Africa’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ Commission at the end of apartheid, to the shifting nature of punishment and prisons over thousands of years. It was at this point that the archive bug bit hard. Research can be immersive and all-consuming – and often incredibly frustrating. But there is little to compare with the excitement of those moments when you finally find that elusive piece of archive material: that fragment, say, from a diary you’ve been hunting. You suddenly feel an incredibly intimate connection with the author. They may have been writing hundreds of years ago – but in an instant you are in a direct conversation with them, and with the past. Time compresses and – when you have time to reflect – you are immensely thankful for all of those archives that dedicate their existence to the preservation of the many disparate fragments of our history.