[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.