I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.

When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469