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.

I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

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.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

I'm glad I was never an heiress.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.