[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.

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

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.