I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'

Freud was just a novelist.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.

I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.