I suppose I have the tastes of someone who teaches at a university in the provinces.

An adaptation I was working on of Trollope's 'The Pallisers' has been axed by the BBC... I was also going to do Dickens' 'Dombey and Son' but they've asked me to do 'David Copperfield' instead.

Rebecca Eaton has made an enormous contribution to the cultural life of America, and, more than that, she is one of the most fun people I know.

People like bonnets. I don't think you can under-estimate that.

I'm absolutely delighted if people think of me as a reliable purveyor of quality period stuff.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

I was getting rewarded for writing well, from about the age of five or six. A teacher would say, "Look what Andrew has written," and I thought, "Maybe I could be a writer."