It often starts with a single character for Robert Harris, or rather, the vague idea of a character that no one else thinks about. He has been a journalist for a long time, and his instinct for stories about people in centers of power, greed and vanity has always been what drove him. For example, the idea for “V2,” his 2020 novel about a German rocket scientist during World War II, came to him when he read an obituary in the newspaper about a woman who was involved with such rockets. It is precisely these people that he finds most interesting, he says: the marginal figures on the big political and historical stages.