Anyone can attract a man. The trick is to keep him.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.
I’m utterly indifferent to Kate Middleton’s baby.
Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.
He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.
Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
I love reading and I love thinking – the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.
You can smile when your heart is breaking because you are a woman, and a courtier, and a Howard. That’s three reasons for being the most deceitful creature on God’s earth.
They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man.
He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?
I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.
The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.
I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.
I am too dark in my heart tonight.
He is my brother. She is my sister. Come what will, they are my kin.
The world hasn’t changed that much; men still rule.
I felt as if we were fighting something worse than Anne, some demon that possessed her, that possessed all of us Boleyns: ambition – the devil that had brought us to this little room and brought my sister to this insane distress and us to this savage battle.