It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

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.

You're sure?' I asked. 'I mean, the Lord of the Sword is great. But you could also be, I don't know, the Slammer of the Hammer'.

How is it that disappointment arrives as soon as what you have desired for so long steps over the threshold? It’s like finding the end of your wedding train dragging behind in the mud.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I'm sorry, but nothing 'just happens'. Stuff happens because either we make it happen or we let it.

Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.

Our lives pass from us like the wind, and why Should wise men grieve to know that they must die? The Judas blossom fades, the lovely face Of light is dimmed, and darkness takes its place.

Really, I'm a neurotic perfectionist. Every single word in the script is the one that I want.

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

As long as you can change paint, you don't change. For you to change - for paint to do something to you - paint must stay constant.

I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK. We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? Because it was, you know; it was the best.