[margaret Thatcher] Aroused Such Strong Loathing In

Some Readers Read A Book As If It Were An Instruction Manual, Expecting To Understand Everything First Time, But Of Course When You Write, You Put Into Every Sentence An Overflow Of Meaning, And You Create In Every Sentence As Many Resonances And Double Meanings And Ambiguities As You Can Possibly Pack In There, So That People Can Read It Again And Get Something New Each Time.

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.

Though I Have Never Thought Of Myself As A Book Collector, There Are Shelves In Our House Browsed So Often, On So Many Rainy Winter Nights, That The Contents Have Seeped Into Me As If By Osmosis.

I Didn't Cry Much After I Was 35, But Staggered Stony-faced Into Middle Age, A Handkerchief Still In My Bag Just In Case.

When I Began To Read As An Adult, My First Big Enthusiasm Was Evelyn Waugh. I Read Almost Exclusively Novelists Of A Generation Back. I Did The Russians, Then I Started Getting More Up To Date.