David Ellison

are certainly known to us.

They're known to us through Goya, right?

Goya does this incredible series of etchings called The Disasters of War, which famously set the template for the kind of atrocities that soldiers are capable of wreaking upon a civilian population.

And in fact, well into the 20th and 21st century, that's still the template.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, two young British artists, recreate the atrocities of war and bring it up to date by showing us what happens in Iraq.

But the idea that somehow or other the Spanish state was organized enough at this time to demand some kind of punishment, that struck me as unlikely.

And that the category of war crimes would be something that the English would acknowledge.

I mean, look, maybe it was an informal arrangement, but that struck a slightly false note for me.

Look, I like those novels.

I like writers who thrust you into the past in all of its estranging horrors.

So Angela Carter, Pat Barker, Hilary Mantel.

George Saunders, all novelists who, drawing upon modernist and postmodern techniques of writing, don't muck around with trying to convince you that this is the way that people spoke necessarily, but this is how they might feel.

If anything, they strip away a lot of the orientation and you're just kind of put into it and you have to find your way.

And that, the shock of that, the violence of that, I find really bracing and really fascinating.

This is another model, which is a kind of slightly trainspottery, right?

So it's all about getting the language right and getting the details right.

So what kind of lamps, what kind of effect did they throw on the wall?

What did people wear?

What was it like to put on these boots?

It's that kind of detail that builds up over time.