It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

We have a number of very powerful women in the world now - Mrs. [Angela] Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher? When she was minister of education, she stopped the children's free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it. They called her "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher."

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

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.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of... It's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really, really mess up your life.