I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

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.

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

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

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.