Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.
I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I’ve just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.
I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.
I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
I can’t read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.
Of course there’s no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.
I’m glad I was never an heiress.
As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.
The real work of destruction had been done long before by satire, libel and rumour; Marie Antoinette had become dehumanized. The actual assault by a body of people inspiring each other with their bloodthirsty frenzy was the culmination of the process, not the start of it.
Kings who become prisoners are not far from death.
It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well.
This time the Empress was supposed to have asked the celebrated healer and pretender to miraculous powers, John Joseph Gassner: “Will my daughter be happy?” His reply was suitably gnomic: “There are crosses for all shoulders.” 3.
People cannot help their predilections, although they may conceal them.
She saw that supreme dignity – and love – lay in tolerance.
As ever in a crisis, Marie Antoinette showed herself the forceful one who nonetheless could not bring herself finally to impose her will.
Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned. But is it really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette?
Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.
A frequent charge made against “Antoinette” was that she was bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.