Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

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

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

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

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

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.