Antonia Fraser

“If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.”

“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 think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.”

“It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.”

“I don't like it, but this afternoon I've told myself I am going to go and get a dress.”

“My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.”

“My mother was a politician in my formative years.”

“After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.”

“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.”