“Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.”

“'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.”

“Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which wou...”