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 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.

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.

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

Music fountains from purity, travels through serenity and dissolves with tranquility.

I applaud those who speak, but I admire those who act.

His teachings, said his disciple Musaeus, had one simple theme: 'Everything comes into being from the One and is resolved into the One again.

NARA must provide security at our facilities to protect our public patrons, our staff, and our holdings.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

I don't consider myself as the best player in the world. I'm not obsessed with individual titles. I'm much more interested in being part of a team which wins trophies.

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings.

There's nothing humane about the flesh of animals who have had one or two or even three improvements made in their singularly rotten lives on today's factory farms.

A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.

If you will fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you; depend upon it.