The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

Here we are, alive, and you and I will have to make it what we can.

I knew I was going to be a journalist when I was eight years old and I saw the printing presses rolling at the Sydney newspaper where my dad worked as a proofreader.

They say the Lord's Day is a day of rest, but those who preach this generally are not women.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.