If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy is mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Beneath every history, another history.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.