Patrick Wright

Neal Ascherson once described me as a "wandering disestablished scholar whose method is to walk and talk". I may be better established nowadays, but I still feel some kinship with the metal detectorists whose world I briefly entered in A Journey Through Ruins. Like them, I work by picking up a signal in the present and then digging. I use libraries and personal testimony, and I've also benefited from journalistic commissions, which have enabled me to get to people and places that would otherwise be out of reach. More at www.patrickwright.net