For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

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

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

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.