My mother was a politician in my formative years.

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.

Sometimes you don’t get the answers you want. That doesn’t mean God isn’t listening

Men are fickle creatures, capable of kindness and compassion yet fascinated by the basest atrocities.

The lot of man is to suffer and die.What's gone is of no consequence.

Certainly it would be wonderful if we all knew exactly who we were.

Justin Timberlake is everything, and what more could you want in a person? He's funny. He's cute. He's great. He just understands. I get him and he gets me, and that's cool.

You don't have to do those things. You don't have to become a hero, Seth.

Life isn't all about what you don't have, but yet, what you do with what you have been given.

Make-up covers a multitude of sins.

Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.

With any character I have played there’s infinite possibilities for how they might behave, depending on who they are talking to or how they react to things.