I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

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

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

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

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.