There's nothing makes you admire people like seeing yourself in them.

When I was 14 and living in London, I'd go around Hampton Court Palace with its marvelous atmosphere, through the gateway where Ann Boleyn walked, the haunted gallery down which Katherine Howard ran. It all set me going. It all started from there.

There's nothing makes you admire people like seeing yourself in them.

Tea! The English could always be pacified with it!

I found that married life gave me the necessary freedom to follow an ambition which had been with me since childhood; and so I started to write in earnest.

I've always thought you've got to believe in luck to get it.

We spent the first night of our honeymoon in a country hotel, with Tudor architecture oak beams, and floors which sloped, of the Queen-Elizabeth-Slept-Here variety. There were old tennis-courts - the Tudor kind where Henry VIII was said to have played; and gardens filled with winter heather, jasmine and yellow chrysanthemums. [...] So that first night together was spent in the ancient bedroom with the tiny leaded paned windows, through which shafts of moonlight touched the room with a dreamlike radiance [...]