In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

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.

Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed? Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.