 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. |
| I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people. |
| I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history. |
| I'm glad I was never an heiress. |
| King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them. |
| After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell. |
| The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous. |
| 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. |
| Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special. |
| 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! |
| I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me. |
| Ninety-seven is my lucky number. |
| It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies. |
| I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting. |
| My mother was a politician in my formative years. |
| I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order. |
| As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism. |
| Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema. |
| That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing. |
| I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell. |
