I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

Do you wish men to speak well of you? Then never speak well of yourself.

No one knows what is in him till he tries, and many would never try if they were not forced to.

I have worked with a great many comedians as opposed to comics, although I have worked with comics as well, I make the distinction.

We learn about tithing by paying it.

For national and social disasters, for moral and financial evils, the cure begins in the Household.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.

Some air you inhale was exhaled by Cleopatra.

There can be leftist groups that have not matured politically.

There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama's attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.