I Spend A Lot Of My Time

Like A Historian, I Interpret, Select, Discard, Shape, Simplify. Unlike A Historian, I Make Up People's Thoughts.

I Am Usually Protective Of My Work, Not Showing It To Anyone Until It Has Been Redrafted And Polished.

What [margaret Thatcher] Made A Play For Was The Acquisitive: Our Greedy Nature. She Set Aside Other Things Like An Identification With Community, Altruism. The Only Collective That She Understood Was: Rally Around And Slay The Enemy.

The More Facts I Can Have, The Better. I Can Operate Very Nicely Between Them, But I Am Not Very Good At Making Things Up. I Am Not Sure How Ethical It Is.

When I Came To Write My Thomas Cromwell Books, I Moved Onto The Center Ground Of English History, But I Was Never There Before. I Didn't Feel It Was My History Particularly, Coming From Northern Britain, Being Of Irish Extraction, Being A Cradle Catholic. The Image Of England I Grew Up With Felt Somewhere Else. There Was An Official England In Postcards, But It Wasn't One I Had Visited. But I Decided To March Onto The Center Ground And Occupy It Whether It Was Mine Or Not.