I Am Very Happy In Second-hand Bookshops;

Once You're Labeled As Mentally Ill, And That's In Your Medical Notes, Then Anything You Say Can Be Discounted As An Artefact Of Your Mental Illness.

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.

I Think The Monarchy Today Is. . . Mildly Interesting And Largely Harmless. I Can't Find I Can Get Very Heated About It. In The Next Couple Of Generations, It Is Bound To Go.

Fiction Leaves Us So Much Work To Do, Allows The Individual So Much Input; You Have To See, You Have To Hear, You Have To Taste The Madeleine, And While You Are Seemingly Passive In Your Chair, You Have To Travel.

The Writer I Adore Is Ivy Compton-burnett.i Couldn't Get More Than A Few Pages In When I First Read Her. In Many Ways, She Is Very Clumsy And Her Plots Are Rubbish. But We Don't Read Her For That. There Are Pages And Pages Of Dialogue. What It Requires Is Real Effort And Attention.