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.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

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

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

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.