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

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

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

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.