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.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.