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

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.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.