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

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

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

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

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.