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.

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

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

By the tits of Holy Agnes

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

I believe this was [Margaret Thatcher] estimate of the voter: "These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to run the household."

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.