Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.

Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.

Those who are made can be unmade.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.