But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

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

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!