History Is A Set Of Skills Rather

You Learn Nothing About Men By Snubbing Them And Crushing Their Pride. You Must Ask Them What It Is They Can Do In This World, That They Alone Can Do.

Wolf Hall Attempts To Duplicate Not The Historian's Chronology But The Way Memory Works: In Leaps, Loops, Flashes.

I Think I Would Have Been A Reasonably Good Lawyer. I Have A Faculty For Making Sense Of Mountains Of Information.

For Me, It Is About Using Everything That Is There And Using The Gaps In The Record, Figuring Out Why The Gaps Might Be There. And Then When You Move On To The Level Of What Historians Said, Laying The Interpretations Side By Side. You Also Have To Look Back At The Documents And Make Your Own Judgments. What The Record Says And What People Say About It. A Novelist Can Fill The Gaps In A Way That A Biographer Cannot.

It Was A Very Funny Conference. I Knew [christopher Hitchens] Before That. He Had Always Been A Good Angel To Me. He Once Stole A Phrase From Me That Came Out Of His Mouth On Television. I Saw His Eyes Move Sideways. I Thought, It's Alright, You Can Have It! The Conference Was Light On Women. Salman Rushdie Showed Up, They Were Doing Their Own Thing. I Didn't Feel Neglected!