I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

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.

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

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

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.

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