Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.

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.

if you want to do a great or a good work, do not trouble to think what the result will be.

This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.

Many, many times I find that whatever is looking good on the screen doesn't always look or feel good on the body. So who do we design for - do we design for the screen, or do we design for women?

Charge less, but charge. Otherwise, you will not be taken seriously, and you do your fellow artists no favours if you undercut the market.

Always count your blessings. Be thankful you are able to be out on a beautiful course. Most people in the world don't have that opportunity.

The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly, but it is slowly learnt by heart.

The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country.

Both this song ['Black Skinhead'], 'I Am a God' and this song were made after Hedi Slimane didn't let me into his first Saint Laurent show.

What advertising dum-dum signed up Ilie Nastase to sell a resort?! Who'd want to go where he's at?

Many of my poems are not sexual.