If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

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.

Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.

It’s a real handicap to have a face with shifty eyes.

Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

Courage lies in being oneself, in showing complete independence, in loving what one loves, in discovering the deep roots of one's feelings.

When I’m photographing I see life.

In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.

That's the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else's worst.

When we [Migos] talk about whatever we're talking about, and you visualise it, that's what we really went through.