I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them.

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.