It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.

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.

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

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.