It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.

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

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

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.

I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.