I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.

He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

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

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

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

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