I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

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.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.