I Think It Is Going To Take

[margaret Thatcher] Is A Woman Who, When She Wrote Her Entry For "who's Who," Didn't Include Her Mother. Now Whether That Was Corrected In Subsequent Editions, I Do Not Know.

As A Writer, You Owe It To Yourself Not To Get Stuck In A Rut Of Looking At The World In A Certain Way.

In My 20s I Was In Constant Pain From Undiagnosed Endometriosis. With No Prospect Of A Cure, I Decided I Needed A Career - Writing - That Could Accommodate Being Ill.

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.

A Sea-green Sky: Lamps Blossoming White. This Is Marginal Land: Fields Of Strung Wire, Of Treadless Tyres In Ditches, Fridges Dead On Their Backs, And Starving Ponies Cropping The Mud. It Is A Landscape Running With Outcasts And Escapees, With Afghans, Turks And Kurds: With Scapegoats, Scarred With Bottle And Burn Marks, Limping From The Cities With Broken Ribs. The Life Forms Here Are Rejects, Or Anomalies: The Cats Tipped From Speeding Cars, And The Heathrow Sheep, Their Fleece Clotted With The Stench Of Aviation Fuel.