If you persist—and “each page,” I wrote, “is like a wall to be painted”—what comes out is a kind of irritable, condensed poetry. Your hand moves so slowly that you can keep changing your mind about what you are going to say, and sentences can end up anywhere at all.

I wrote on the computer screen, but my dominant hemisphere was in charge, my right hand steering the topic. I could trust myself not to do anything wild. For four years in the 1980s, I wrote a film column for the Spectator. Eight hundred words were requested, and though from time to time I turned in 799, I was seldom expansive to the tune of 801. After a while I didn’t even have to use a word count function. All my views—on anything—fitted into 800 words. “Should we be in Iraq?” Eight hundred words. “Is it cold out?” Eight hundred words.

If I were to be granted a coat of arms—an unlikely scenario, I admit—my motto would be “It’s not that simple.” Being a novelist has taught me, if I didn’t know before, that almost all human situations are complex, ambiguous and shifting. There is always more information, and more emerging information, than you can process, but the crudities of public debate require oppositional postures, the drawing of lines in the dust. I wouldn’t trust my left hand, even in what seemed a clear-cut controversy. My right hand, which is conventional, is, I hope, impeccably liberal, but what if my left hand turned out to be Ann Widdecombe, or to be a lyrical terrorist, seething with underdog’s discontent?

I wouldn’t trust my left hand, even in what seemed a clear-cut controversy. My right hand, which is conventional, is, I hope, impeccably liberal, but what if my left hand turned out to be Ann Widdecombe, or to be a lyrical terrorist, seething with underdog’s discontent?

But, while the columnist is retained to turn over clichés as fast as the stock at Topshop, the novelist should produce a couture response—lovingly tailored, personal, an unmistakable one-off.

Fiction isn’t made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It’s about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled onto the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.

Those were the days, before feminism, before AIDS, before the sex abuse scandals, when I could laugh at what enrages me now: the hypocrisy, the waste, the damage.

Many years later I needed it, to help me write my novel Fludd. I wanted to quote it verbatim; it was beyond me to make this stuff up. Drawing on the network of influence that spreads outward from a master criminal such as myself, I activated a daughter of the house to travel from her home in Liverpool, divert the attention of her parents, and slip the book into her traveling bag. In this way it came home to the woman who appreciates it most, and who keeps it to hand in case of sudden difficulty.

Once they became a matter of writing essays, my blinding verbal facility— no credit to me at all, I had done nothing to acquire it—meant that I sounded as if I knew what I was talking about, even when I didn’t.

Who owns stories and where do they come from? The last part of the question is one that readers ask all the time; writers are very poor at giving the answer. We don’t like to say “from the personal columns,” or “from the small ads,” even if it’s true. It sounds too obvious, too much like the way people assume authors operate.

We all want interrupting, saving from ourselves, from the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter that’s going nowhere: at least, going nowhere on that particular day.

If the problem is a whole novel that won’t work but won’t go away, the modern writer can take on a Project from Porlock. … It’s almost guaranteed to come to nothing, so you won’t need another project from Porlock to save you from having to deliver the first draft; besides, while the film industry lawyers are poring over the small print of the contracts, you may well have solved your initial problem, or just grown old and died.

That said, why is the act of writing, the moment-by-moment compression of the keys, so dreaded by so many writers? Why do they have to interpose opium, or alcohol, or some other stimulant or sedative, before they can perform their trade’s basic function? You don’t hear of accountants who can’t open a spreadsheet, or farmers who take against fields.

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: just do it; get something, anything, onto the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticize them later. You give this advice but can’t always take it. You dread setting off down any one narrative path, because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible. Select one, write it, and it begins to seem in some sense preordained, natural, correct; the other options fade from memory. Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. … We don’t want to choose; we want to keep open all the possibilities, fill a lifetime with fresh and less-than-final versions.

What is worst, what is most wretched, is being almost ready to write. A horrible day dawns when the prospect of writing hangs over you like a cloud from which you are afraid you might never emerge. You know you will do it, you know you will commit. You know that by the end of the day you will be wrung out, speechless, barely human.

But, unfortunately for writers, there’s no intellectual equivalent of the sexual climax; they don’t always know when they’ve finished.

I accept that to an RP speaker my broad slow vowels are evidence of stupidity. What bothers me is that nowadays, to a northern ear, I sound southern: that is to say, insufferably posh and affected. I don’t belong anywhere. And this gives me a problem: which bits of English history are my history?

In those days I was groaning under a burden of truth. In my family, as in so many, an active censorship bore on both past and present. There were things you could say in the house, but not out of the house; perhaps there was a third category of things you could say in the garden. It is hard for a child to learn where the boundaries are, and also difficult not to be in the wrong place when adults utter what they regret. Aged eight or so, I seemed to lose my hearing for a year. Anything you said, I asked in a tone of hard incredulity to have repeated: “What?” I must have developed a protective filter, because in time I could hear again. The voice continued to say “What?” but it spoke inside. There were things you knew but must study to unknow, and things that could only be said allegorically. By way of allegory, a child might have a symptom. My brother couldn’t catch his breath. No chance of saying the wrong thing, when you couldn’t even breathe.

Their process drove me into a frenzy of irritation and dislike: the slow, painful scratch of metal as it snagged rough paper: the goggle-eyed stare at the result, as if the writer had insulted herself: the slow reaching for the pink sheet, the emphatic, vengeful pressure on the page.

Ink is a generative fluid. If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all; the only tip you can give to a prospective writer is “try to mean what you say.” We feel protected when we write on a screen, but (as with the magic slate) we can be fooled. Erasure seems simple—blink and it’s gone, overwrite the line. But nothing ever really goes away. The internet keeps regurgitating you. You can’t bury or burn your traces.

At some stage I must have made a commitment to commitment, and to stand by my mistakes, because I noticed that only bubbleheads used washable, bright blue ink, and took to Permanent Black.

I have ninety-seven notebooks in a wooden box. I do not count them as suppressed volumes. I work on the principle that there is no failed work, only work pending: that there is nothing I won’t say, only what I haven’t said yet.

Professional expatriates live like that. Real travelers are vulnerable creatures, at once attracted and repelled by the cultures they move among, but expatriates are hard to reach, hard to impress; they carry about with them the plastic bubble of their own culture, and nothing touches them until it has been filtered through the protective membrane of prejudice, the life-support system that forms their invisible excess baggage when they move on, from one contract to the next, to another country and another set of complaints.

When you arrive in Saudi Arabia you cease to travel, in the ordinary sense. To move between cities you need letters from a higher authority, a sort of internal passport, and these are not granted without good reason; women, also, need written permission from their husbands if they want to make a journey.

The cities of Arabia are all alike today; skyscrapers, fast roads, municipal greenery nourished at vast expense; a seafront called the Corniche, Al Kournaich, the Cornish Road. The joyless, oily sea is lined by vast amusement parks, where grave sheikhs and their male offspring test their nerve on the roller coasters; the women, in chaperoned parties, shop for furs and diamonds in vast glittering malls, in the Schönbrunns and Winter Palaces of the consumer’s art. … The pace of life is murderous. Each intersection has its little massacre.

The woman herself was just a shape, glimpsed sometimes in the early evenings, bundled into her concealing black abaya and the Saudi version of the veil—which covers the face completely, even the eyes. Clutching her small baby, she swayed from the front door to the car, and into the back seat. Family cars in the Kingdom are furnished not only with fringed mats, and boxes of Kleenex, and dangle-dollies, but with curtains; so that once she is safely in the back seat, the woman can lift her veil.

Family cars in the Kingdom are furnished not only with fringed mats, and boxes of Kleenex, and dangle-dollies, but with curtains; so that once she is safely in the back seat, the woman can lift her veil. She cannot be seen then, she cannot see; but what does she want with the view?

Jamila set out her textbooks. She was a vigorous, square-jawed woman, who looked strong; her long hair had a rippling wave, and a coarse black sheen. Her face, unveiled, was very white, unnaturally so, slightly pitted from recently cleared acne; I thought of women in Europe, not too long ago, whitening and poisoning their skins with lead.

Now her voice, rasping, confident, would be on the phone in the mornings. “We are going to Mecca. Do you want anything?” When the coast was clear she would come downstairs, veiled for the minute’s journey, and drink coffee with me. She would throw off her abaya inside the front door, and reveal her Levis and tight T-shirt underneath. “You ought to get one of these,” she would say, dropping the black cloak on the sofa. “Lots of English women wear them. You can just throw them on over any old things that you’re wearing.”

When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the compliment of hating it.

You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing—nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page.

Dressed as a miniature courtier, his hair powdered, the child was inducted into a protocol intended to squeeze out of him any vestige of warmth or humanity. Idleness was the gateway to vice; there should be no downtime, and no daydreaming. Day and night, three attendants watched him. Every casual word was reported to his tutors. All signs of emotion, in his presence, were to be erased; he should neither express feeling, nor see it expressed. Above all, the child who would grow up to own a tenth of France was to be protected from his fellow countrymen; he should never glimpse a common, hungry Frenchman, a grubby Frenchman with an ardent heart.

Every seminal emission became the subject of a police report. Louis XV watched his nobility intently for challenges to his authority; only while they were copulating were they not conspiring.

Louis XV watched his nobility intently for challenges to his authority; only while they were copulating were they not conspiring.

Much early revolutionary activity was funded from Philippe’s deep pockets. It constellated around the Palais-Royal, which the duke turned into a sort of demagogue’s shopping center—Paris’s most volatile public space, crammed with cafés and bookshops, a gathering place for the disaffected.

The revolutionaries, a friend pointed out, squeezed him like a lemon and threw him away.

My mother is walking, pacing between the kitchen and the front room. Sometimes she quickens her stride as new people buzz in and out. She turns about and about, to smile at those who come in at the front door and those who come in at the back; she swivels on her heels, smiling into their faces.

Her voice rises high and hangs itself on one of the vacant cuphooks on the shelves above my grandmother’s kitchen table.

In Europe in the days when maternal mortality was high—that is, every age till very recently—a bereaved husband acted just like the father in the Tale of the Juniper Tree; he wept greatly, then he wept a bit less, then he rose and took a new wife. At some point, the child of the lost wife is sure to ask: “What did my mother die of?” In the Juniper Tree, the mother died of “joy.” It’s a more acceptable answer than “she died of you.” But not many children, in real life or in fairy tales, can have been fooled in this way. … Generations have been born into blood-guilt and reared by wraiths, the dead mother hovering over the cradle, blighting the new marriage: souring the milk and cracking the bowls, starting fires in the thatch and unravelling the products of the loom.

There can be few mothers who, trapped with a fractious, wailing, ungrateful baby, have not wished it momentarily removed, and then become afraid of the dark powers the wish might attract.

In life, as in the fairy stories, children will cling to even the most abusive parent. Hansel and Gretel make their way back to the couple who have tried to abandon them, and hope this time it will be different.

Normal parents cannot understand child-killers, but fairy tales hold up a distorting mirror that enhances our petty guilts. There can be few mothers who, trapped with a fractious, wailing, ungrateful baby, have not wished it momentarily removed, and then become afraid of the dark powers the wish might attract.

What became clear, as her life opened up, was how little her personality owed to mine. I could not predict her reactions, but I could certainly feel her emotions: I relished the quiet triumph of her later life when, a benefactor to her community, a stalwart of welfare committees, she lived in comfort in a house on a hill with the real love of her life, a white bull terrier called Billy.

It is possible to make a photofit for Gulfman. He is thirty to thirty-five, lower middle class and embarrassingly aspirant. His education is redbrick/polytechnic. He believes himself to be shrewd, likes to say that he is a cynic. He reads Wilbur Smith and the free magazine that comes with his new Gold Card. Jewelry is worn—sometimes a Credit Suisse token on a chain. He despises the arts—he might go to the amateur Gilbert and Sullivan, if there is someone in it he knows. He likes to talk about camcorders, compact discs, kit-cars and tax shelters. His wife—very often his second wife—is deeply interested in nail polish. Her ambition is to open a nursery school.

It’s fraught terrain, with an intricate and fascinating industrial history—yet famous, post-industrially, for nothing but the Moors murders and Harold Shipman. It’s where I grew up, and this must be the reason I bought the book when Jonathan Cape published it in 1989. I have an inability to fully believe in the village where I was born, and when I was a child, if I found it on a map, I would stare and stare, squashing the name under my finger: there it is in print, so it must be real.

I have an inability to fully believe in the village where I was born, and when I was a child, if I found it on a map, I would stare and stare, squashing the name under my finger: there it is in print, so it must be real.

Those stiff little Lowry figures hide terrible secrets behind their mufflers: cancers, malignant hypertension, anemia. They have inhaled asbestos fibers and been downwind of chemical escapes. They drink, smoke, cough blood. Bus conductors fall on them, and knock them “cockeyed” with their ticket machines. Bales of cotton tumble from lorries and bowl them over.

His world was, I think, more cohesive than ours. He despaired of it, but he felt part of it—a citizen of a provincial city, with stern obligations to public work and to high culture.

Survivors are reluctant to admit that anorexia, which in the end leads to invalidity and death, is along the way a path of pleasure and power: it is the power that confers pleasure, however freakish and fragile the gratification may seem. When you are isolated, your back to the social wall, control over your own ingestion and excretion is all you have left; this is why professional torturers make sure to remove it.

It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, noli me tangere. Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all. Anorexia can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival.

It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, noli me tangere. Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time.

In those days, if a young man said he had a pain, the doctors listened to his heart, took his blood pressure, examined the bit of him he was complaining about. But women patients—especially young women—were routinely suspected of casting mental distress into the form of physical symptoms.

The strange pain that was no known pain was the beginning of a disease process that left me infertile by the age of twenty-seven, and which leaves me, even today, an unwilling stranger in my own body.

But you should also look at how the childless woman is regarded. The biological clock is often ticking most loudly in the ears of onlookers, critics. … A woman who stays childless is still an object of curiosity, misunderstanding and dislike.

The women of any family have history written on their bodies. Mostly, it’s a story of progress. But our story stops with me.

The rest of the family were in a lively DIY commercial, while I had slid away from them into an after-midnight horror film.

As the paper dropped in curls to the floorboards, I would have liked to drop and curl up too; as I bled, sweated and shook, something was scraping and chiseling, urgently, inside my body. I felt—and I was right—that I was leaving normal life behind. The rest of the family were in a lively DIY commercial, while I had slid away from them into an after-midnight horror film.

When I was twenty-seven—a skinny, gray-faced scrap, bleeding continuously and hardly able to stand upright—my disease was named. But it was named on the operating table, and to make me viable I had to lose part of my bladder and my bowel, my womb and my ovaries. I woke up to a strange future—childlessness, a premature menopause, and a marriage, already tottering, that would soon fall apart.

The injured self you take away from your consultation is the self you take home. Suffering may not be avoidable, but stigma is under social control.

After a few weeks the company moved us to another place, smaller, better for two. It was dark and the lights had to be kept on all day, as if it were the English winter. Each room had many doors, double doors made of dark wood, so it was like a coffin showroom. We took some of them off, but the impression of death persisted.

I laughed. What strange shapes liberty takes: some bow-legged particolored jockey, some stumpy pony lumbering toward the winning post, some dusty track measured in furlongs, some holiday crowd in a free state.

I had not always been lucky, had not always been blessed; but, illness aside, I had a savage and hidden faculty for managing my desires: for slapping and pounding fate, a rickety raw-faced amateur who should never have stepped into the ring with the hard-fisted likes of me.

Now, now, I said—despite the steroids, the sickness, the embarrassing hairdo, despite the job search, the uncertainty, the displacement, now despite everything, despite the fact that I am thirty-four and just beginning, this is the happiest day of my life.

Not many people have the good fortune to pinpoint it, to log it, to feel it while it’s happening and skewer it down. We drained our glasses, brushed the crisp crumbs from our persons and strolled back to the hotel. March 13, Limassol, 1986.

Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave. And because people say “trust me,” it doesn’t mean they’ll keep your secrets.

For some people, being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do. After their first rigor, they reshape themselves, taking on a flexibility in public discourse.

You can’t write or speak about the princess without explicating and embellishing her myth. She no longer exists as herself, only as what we made of her. Her story is archaic and transpersonal. “It is as if,” said the psychotherapist Warren Colman, “Diana broadcast on an archetypal frequency.”

Even in childhood photos Diana seems to pose, as if watching her own show. Her gaze flits sideways, as if to check everyone is looking at her. One “friend” told a TV crew that as a teenager, “whenever you saw her alone she would have picked up some trashy romantic novel.” Leave aside the casual denigration of women’s taste: if Diana imagined herself—the least and youngest daughter—as magnificent, all-conquering, a queen, she had a means of turning her daydream into fact.

Grief is exhausting, as we all know. The bereaved are muddled and tense, they need allowances made. But who knows you are mourning, if there is nothing but a long face to set you apart? No one wants to go back to the elaborate conventions of the Victorians, but they had the merit of tagging the bereaved, marking them out for tenderness. And if your secret was that you felt no sorrow, your clothes did the right thing on your behalf. Now funeral notices specify “colorful clothing.” The grief-stricken are described as “depressed,” as if sorrow were a pathology. We pour every effort into cheering ourselves up and releasing balloons. When someone dies, “he wouldn’t have wanted to see long faces,” we assure ourselves—but we cross our fingers as we say it. What if he did? What if the dead person hoped for us to rend our garments and wail?

Mourning is work. It is not simply being sad. It is naming your pain. It is witnessing the sorrow of others, drawing out the shape of loss. It is natural and necessary and there is no healing without it.

Mourning is work. It is not simply being sad. It is naming your pain. It is witnessing the sorrow of others, drawing out the shape of loss.

It is irrelevant to object that Diana alive bore no resemblance to Diana dead. The crowds were not deluded about what they had lost. They were not mourning something perfect, but something that was unfinished.

The work of mourning, if not performed when it is due, seems to be stored up for us, often for many years. It compounds and complicates our later griefs.

Recovery can seem like a betrayal. Passionately, you desire a way back to the lost object, but the only possible road, the road to life, leads away.

For Lewis, a lightening of the heart produces, paradoxically, a more vivid impression of his dead wife than he could conjure when he was in a pit of despair.

Orton grew up in Leicester, not “in the gutter,” as he says, but in a council house.

Halliwell complains of “reading his manuscripts and finding that every single thing I have ever thought or said has been included.”

Presumably to show the real-life process of careful filing, recycling and self-congratulatory smirking would alert the paying public to the fact that the creative process is no more glamorous than a job with the Gas Board.

Halliwell is “the first wife,” someone says, who becomes a liability when his partner goes up in the world; gradually he appears more and more bloated and menopausal, downing Valium and standing on his dignity.

Her fashionable, photogenic face is made up of intersecting hatchet blades. She has a determined jaw. She has a head of immaculate pale-blonde corkscrew curls—the kind of head achieved only at some cost in money and physical pain—and when (later) she rises from bed after a night of passion, it does not resemble a white woolly mat, but is as cleverly corkscrewed as ever.

What is interesting is the way the audience’s sympathies are manipulated. Alex is a siren, then she is sick and mad and dangerous; she has no human feelings that we need take into account, and when Glenn Close manifests them, with a haunted and poignant face, she is acting against the drift of the direction. But when—at an early date—Dan sets the law on the troublesome harpy, and when he suggests she abort her child, and when he half-strangles her, we must somehow sympathize with him. It is the casting that sets this up.

Their violence is excused because of the directors’ intentions, which are often impeccably liberal; but these intentions seldom cut much ice with the ordinary cinema audience, who drool—if drooling is their bent—just the same.

This film is energetic, visually brilliant and very funny, with a sharp script that is never allowed to hold up the carnage. Its violence is spectacular, totally unrealistic and—who knows?—perhaps quite therapeutic.

Digging up the 1960s is an industry now; it is heresy to say that perhaps the decade was not so special after all, that probably every generation feels that “when we were young” was an age of tumult, hedonism and depravity unparalleled in the history of the world.

If there is a drawback, it is that the film exposes the crassness, pomposity and ineptitude of most of what is on the circuit. There may be some people who don’t like it; but they will not be the sort of people you would like to dine with.

This film is almost perfect. It could very easily have gone wrong; it could have made fun of the withdrawn, elderly innocents, or it could have been cynical about them. But its humor is gentle and observant, and its pace is calm and precisely calculated. The acting is a revelation; you will appreciate it, although it is done in Danish. The ironies are not obtrusive; some are sweet, others to be savored.

Babette’s whole 10,000 francs have been spent on the feast, but she does not mind that, because she is an artist and she has indulged her art; she has remembered her own nature, and introduced others to their real appetites. The pastor himself said, “The only things we can take from this earthly life are the things we have given away.”

It is easier for them to commune with steeples, radio masts, birds and airplanes than with the foreshortened humans at street level. … Around them is the constant susurration of human voices, the bewilderment on human faces, fragments of trouble, pain and delight half grasped, understood with a superior knowledge but never with a human knowledge. They long for this knowledge, as children long to exchange their own mental world for the brutal insights of adulthood.

One of the angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), wants to become human. He longs to be bound to earth and eat earthly food. He dreams of coming home at the end of the working day to feed his cat; of getting his fingers blackened by newsprint. “At last to guess,” he says, “instead of always knowing.”

The casting of John Hurt as Ward is a declaration of intent. He is at the center of the film, and it would be difficult for this actor to play an unsympathetic character.

The casting of John Hurt as Ward is a declaration of intent.

Harry reveals himself as a thorough-going pessimist; when he gets a new book he reads the last page first, in case he dies suddenly. … In his mouth, the simplest statement assumes the most fantastic complexity. Sally is a simpler, flatter creature.

“You look like a human being,” Sally tells Harry, “but actually you are the angel of death.” … It’s sharply observant, too, about American neuroses, urban fears: “I’m definitely coming down with something,” Harry mutters. “Maybe one of those twenty-four-hour tumors that are going around.”

Talking on Woman’s Hour recently, Nora Ephron explained how her most painful experiences have gone into her work. Her mother, who was also a screenwriter, used to tell her “Everything’s copy.” … It seems that people sometimes like to have their intimate dilemmas presented to them in terms that are slick and witty and bittersweet instead of just bitter.

It seems that people sometimes like to have their intimate dilemmas presented to them in terms that are slick and witty and bittersweet instead of just bitter.

If artists in the middle of a creative effort find praise pleasing, they may also find it beside the point; and it is belittling to genius suddenly to find itself in the forefront of fashion.

Tomek functions in the world, he holds down his job, but like someone with a serious mental illness he makes objects of other people; it seems he cannot enter into any human feelings but his own. Or perhaps this is exactly what obsession is like: an intolerable, pathological narrowing of focus, to which any of us could fall victim in the course of our lives.

The laconic script and the telescope’s framed, selected and partial images generate a sense of unease; we do not know precisely how peculiar Tomek is.

What marks Kieslowski out as a great director is that he allows the viewer’s own perceptions space to develop.

Heads disappear sometimes, and the cast act with their feet.

Campion and her co-writer Gerard Lee have an ear for the slightly skewed phrase, for the accents of gentility, for the periphrasis affected by those unsure of their ground.

On the visual level, its selective and eccentric decisions emphasize the art of seeing, not the art of film; and in its screenplay you will frequently hear the kind of thing that (unfortunately) people actually say.

These days, like other mature lovelies, JB asserts that beauty has been a burden—though you notice that these people never have plastic surgery in reverse.

It is unfair to categorize this film as soft porn. The sex is straight, dull and noisy, but the whole is far funnier than most of the comedies on the circuit. No connoisseur of the preposterous should miss it.

To prevent confusion and jealousy, she has instituted a single official birthday for the five, an annual “husbands’ day,” when her exes turn up with a present for each.

The characters are not rebels, for there is no straight society for them to raise rebellion against. What lies in their past is vague but ghastly. You don’t want or need to know.

Moving too close for comfort, the camera notes the liquid tackiness of Lula’s nail polish, the sheen of Sailor’s snakeskin jacket, the manic flicker of light in the white iris of a black woman’s eye.

Lynch constantly, purposefully undermines his own best effects with macabre jokes and little pieces of whimsy. He does this, I think, to escape the charge of tenderness; for here and there we catch him softening toward his benighted creations.

Then in the semi-darkness Hill acknowledges his friends. Faces peer from adjacent tables, nodding and leering, faces like a compendium of pathological types from a Victorian text on crime.

For three hours Scorsese holds the viewer’s interest without once soliciting his sympathy—that is a great feat of filmmaking.

This is not tiresome; Stillman is close enough to his characters to treat them with sympathy and gentleness, but far enough away to watch them with an ironic eye. We see them revise their childlike belief that sincerity is the only virtue to practice; they learn the value of concealment and the damage that candor can do.

Women have dominion over their drawing rooms. They take a turn about the room, they progress sedately from the hearthside to the pianoforte. Unless men arrange a conveyance and an escort, their world is limited to the distance they can cover on foot. Jane Austen does not write about rich women who can order up a carriage, or about working women who must go out in all weathers and not mind about how they look. She writes about women of limited means who must mind about their appearance very much. Bad weather keeps them indoors, their little boots inadequate for the rutted lanes. They stay under the eyes of their families. If these families, through pride or plenty, free them from household tasks, they draw, make music, embroider, read sermons and hatch schemes for marrying off their acquaintances. If, like Jane herself, their circumstances are more pinched, they make light meals and darn stockings, and worry over the prospect of becoming a governess.

A ten-year silence on the page may not be a ten-year silence in the head.

In the end the Court of Appeal decided he had not committed the offense. Now you can see the dangers here. If the young person is pleading not guilty, it is very tempting to start talking to them about the offense and almost persuading them that they must be guilty, and that, if only they told you they were guilty, then you would be able to assist.

It may be argued that psychiatric investigation cannot serve up “truth.” It can only make an untestable version, a plausible story that fits together. It allows us to make metaphor, and myth. And that, if we are exact about the nature of the enterprise, is what Gitta Sereny has done in the case of Mary Bell.

The problem is also the nature of memory, the passage of time and language itself, the language of the many versions and the meaning that slides away between them. “I must have done, I must have known, I must have thought…,” says Mary, reporting on her state of mind as she killed Martin Brown. I must have … The eleven-year-old child speaks through the mouth of a woman of forty. It is hard not to think that Mary is a giant translation problem. If we could solve it, would we hear a language that means anything to us?

What is it that we fear? Not the loss to the victim, but the loss of innocence in ourselves; not Mary outside, but Mary inside; not her loss of control, but the fragility of it in ourselves. We can, as Gitta Sereny suggests, “use” Mary, less to confirm our faith in society than to confirm the daily wonder that we believe in society at all. We can, with effort, see Mary not as alien, but Mary as kin, as a stained and transgressive being like us: with the malady of being human, and with no hope of a cure.

What is it that we fear? Not the loss to the victim, but the loss of innocence in ourselves; not Mary outside, but Mary inside; not her loss of control, but the fragility of it in ourselves.

The stories vary in length between a few wry paragraphs and what used to be called a novella. The best of them have a novel’s worth of content, without clutter or digression. They are capacious stories, like soft leather bags, and they carry within them the present and the past of America, enfolded like twins in the womb.

At its best her comedy is laconic and muffled, like indecent mirth at a funeral. She doesn’t play for laughs; a twisted smile merely arrives on the page.

Proulx’s concern with the economic conditions of these lives underpins her work. She is not a romantic, or given to the pathetic fallacy; these stories are never sentimental or elegiac. The characters are not doomed, they are harassed, disregarded and gnawed by chronic anxiety about the basics of existence. If the natural order is indifferent to them, so is the free market. They live in that kind of economic insecurity, without reserves, where the least piece of ill luck can break them.

Her life and work are fascinating because there were contradictions in her politics, in her sexuality, in everything she did and everything she was; in old age she spoke of the “distressing multiplicity” of the human personality. She was a rebel whose instincts were profoundly conservative, a proud outcast who loved the status quo. … It is her vices, as much as her virtues, that make her letters so compelling.

It may have been the effort to mediate between two mindsets that led to the diversity of her work; neither novels nor reportage could satisfy a restless talent.

There are occasional glimpses, in these letters, of the abyss that opened at her feet: the feeling that art has eaten up life. After Wells’s death she says, “I want to write nothing. I want to live and I have left it too long.”

Its child-narrator describes events she could not possibly have witnessed, but describes them with a sensuous precision that almost convinces the reader that her consciousness predates her birth.

Food is as revealing as money and sex, and is revealed more often. People can’t wait to tell you that they mustn’t eat cabbage or have a craving for puddings; whereas how frequently do you hear, I’ve got ten thousand in my deposit account, or I can’t bear parting with small change?

The forces that shape our behavior, Bedford tells us, lie further back in the past than we know, back in a family and a culture we may have abandoned.

Her error is of the kind that is passed over, but not forgiven. As Ivy Compton-Burnett says, “Time has too much credit … It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all.”

In the quasi-autobiographical form, every revelation is balanced by a concealment. No writer can produce except out of her own experience, however disguised, and for that reason the dull injunction to “write what you know” is superfluous.

It is a sustaining myth of the law that it exists as an awesome neutral force, a force beyond interpretation, beyond ideology, beyond individual persons. Sister Helen shows, if demonstration is needed, how the practice and effect of law arises out of culture.

A capital trial is—contrary to general belief—much more expensive than leaving someone to rot in jail for a lifetime.

When the government touches a corpse, it contaminates the private citizen. A modern nation that deals in state-sponsored death, becomes, in part, dead in itself; dead certainly, to the enlightened ideals from which America derives its existence as a nation.

Dressing in the morning, she had to stand naked until she was handed a shift by the highest-ranking lady present; if, halfway through the ceremony, a lady of higher rank entered, Antoinette must shiver till the newcomer took her place in the line-up. She could do nothing for herself; if she wanted a glass of water, and the right person was not available to pass it to her, she had to go thirsty.

The Queen is self-absorbed, but not self-possessed. It is the people who dress her who own her. … Rose Bertin made and dressed a life-sized doll to look like Antoinette, and so one wonders: Was she ever “me” or only a simulation of a person, a dressed doll wheeled along by other people, its outer surface decorated with mirrors to reflect her times?

In those days, to seem it was to be it, but Louis XVI’s court, powdered and reeking of Fargeon’s chemical experiments, seems to exist in a different time frame from that of the sober black-clad deputies who met in Versailles in the spring of 1789 to represent the Third Estate, the common people of France. By 1789, the King’s power to regulate his subjects’ style and taste was in the past, though the King had not noticed. … If anyone can dress up as a queen, anyone can, at a casual glance, seem a queen.

In the complex pre-Revolution scam known as the Diamond Necklace Affair—which was a public relations disaster for Antoinette, although she was not at fault—she had been imitated by a prostitute who had been specially coached, to ape her style. The demimondaine had sent out all the right signals to the man who was to be conned. She moved in silence, in a floating white dress, a rose in her hand; at dusk in the grounds of the palace, she walked the walk.

It is unfashionable to say this, in post-Marxist times, but it is true: if you want to understand what happened in the Revolution and why, it is better to keep your eye on fluctuating bread prices, rather than fluctuating hemlines.

The joy of his dry and witty book is in its accumulation of fine detail, and also in its broad humanity. Emerging from most studies of the past, the reader feels a leaden ache, a sense of pity and waste and dread. From this book, the reader emerges exhilarated, provoked, amused, with an insight into the ingenuity and potential of human beings and a sense that the past was not a place of insensate ignorance and darkness, but a place we are privileged to revisit through the craft of such an original, painstaking and erudite historian.

But I am content to be numbered among the many historians whose books remain literary constructions, shaped by their author’s moral values and intellectual assumptions.

Keith Thomas has performed his life’s work with scissors and ink, staples, index books, old envelopes, cardboard boxes and a forest of slips of paper: “some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion.” He admits, “The sad truth is that much of what it has taken me a lifetime to build up by painful accumulation can now be achieved by a moderately diligent student in the course of a morning.”

The raw materials of composition could fill a room, a house. Keith Thomas has performed his life’s work with scissors and ink, staples, index books, old envelopes, cardboard boxes and a forest of slips of paper: “some of them get loose and blow around the house, turning up months later under a carpet or a cushion.”

“When I read, I am looking out for material relating to several hundred different topics … In G. M. Young’s famous words, my aim is to go on reading till I can hear the people talking.”

Instances of crepuscular insight, coupled with the qualms of self-doubt, are for the privileged but disinterested eye; they come more readily to the artist than to the politician or the aid worker or the hard-hatted man driving a digger into the jungle. You have to pick your place to stand, and work by the light of informed intellect, before you can judge whether social institutions or indeed whole societies are accreting meaning or leaking it away.

Oppression, he notices, doesn’t make people saintly, it makes them potential killers; all victims are dangerous.

It is a common experience of expatriates and travelers that, when you meet someone from another culture, you begin to act out a part you feel you have been assigned in an earlier life. Your persona goes into action, and you deliver the lines provided by some mysterious central scripting unit.

To the historian, the reader says, “Take this document, object, person—tell me what it means.” To the novelist, he says, “Now tell me what else it means.”

The instruments of torture that you see in museums are usually nineteenth-century artifacts. If you take, for example, the Iron Maiden, a spiked metal coffin which impales its victim, it appears to have been created as entertainment by a Nuremberg antiquarian who put it on display in a used prison. And copies of this grim fantasy went on tour through Great Britain and America: and Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, put it in a story. And the Iron Maiden has been with us ever since

The instruments of torture that you see in museums are usually nineteenth-century artifacts. If you take, for example, the Iron Maiden, a spiked metal coffin which impales its victim, it appears to have been created as entertainment by a Nuremberg antiquarian who put it on display in a used prison.

If you wanted to do something new, you were as well to present it as something old.

For them, time is not an arrow pointing forward, but a candle burning down.

It reads more like a vast transcript of the Revolution, verbatim, than like something invented.

In five years, he ages twenty. In 1789 you see a dreamy, soft-featured young man who might be a poet. By 1794 the flesh falls away from a clenched jaw, the head becomes a skull. In revolution everything speeds up, every process is accelerated.

What does it mean, to stand in for someone else? To embody the collective will? What happens when you step onto the stage of history? When your clothes become costumes, and your face a mask?

I need a solid house for characters to live in. In fact, I should not call them “characters,” I should call them “people”—they are real, even if they happen to be dead.

The task of historical fiction is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in a body. In this lecture, I would like to talk about the practical job of resurrection, and the process that gets historical fiction onto the page.

Research is not a separate phase from writing. There is no point where the writer can say, “I know enough.” Writing a novel is not like building a wall. Your preparatory stage is about digging deep, understanding context and evolving a total world picture.

In every scene, the writer’s opportunity comes at the point of change. A person doesn’t notice the street he walks down every day. But when they knock down the house on the corner, and a new vista is revealed—that’s when your character notices, and that’s when you can describe. Landscapes, streetscapes, objects, are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the senses of your character, though his perceptions, his opinions, his point of view.

You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged. The reader should be a welcome guest in your house of invention, but he shouldn’t put his feet up on the furniture. Just when he’s settling, you need to open the gap between them and us: just let in a flash of light, to show the gap is there.

Historical truth is a rough beast—shapeless, blundering, hard to tame. It fights you every step. It cuts against storyteller’s instinct. Your characters are never how or where you’d like them to be.

If you describe a battle, you must ask yourself, at what point did it become possible to say that this side had won, and this side lost? Posterity gives out the prizes—sees who won the battle and who won the war. When you are situated in history, as we all are, you don’t hear the great drumroll of fate, but penny whistles and the banging of dustbin lids. Every great shift in human history happens on just another day—a Tuesday in July, as it may be, the sun coming out after Monday’s rain, the Paris streets filling up again, but a dozen things to delay you as you try to get across the river and, when you get there, the world-shaking event is over.

The theater is superb at surprise. It offers us thought condensed into action, just as the cinema does: it also takes an image and springs it open, so something powerful and unexpected jumps out.

Each way of telling, each medium for telling, draws a different potential from the original. Adaptation, done well, is not a secondary process, a set of grudging compromises—but an act of creation in itself.

We are oblivious of information until we are ready for it. One day, we feel a resonance, from the soles of the feet to the cranium. Without mediation, without apology, we read ourselves, and know what we know.

But women are full of potential. Thwart them one way and they will find another. What never left me was the feeling that something was knocking inside my chest, asking to be let out.

It had not occurred to me that there was anything to forgive—that anything was ensouled that could grieve, that could endure through the years. But there was a hairline connection to that day in my early life, and at last I could cut the tie and it could sail free.

Imagination is not to be scorned. Fragile, fallible, it goes on working in the world.

For decades, the nice and the good have been talking to each other, chitchat in every forum going, ignoring what stews beneath: envy, anger, lust. On both sides of the ocean, the bien-pensants put their fingers in their ears and smiled and bowed at one another, like nodding dogs or painted puppets.

We watched in silence as it cruised high above. “I don’t know if it is an eagle,” he said at last. “But I know that bird is bigger than you think.”

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

When anyone refers—as papers and magazines do at holiday time—to the pleasures of “escaping” into a good book, you can be sure the writer has no idea what books are for. They are not there to allow you to escape, but to give you information about the human condition, which is a thing you cannot escape. You find out the use of books when you are very young. History, biography and novels in particular lend you experience that is not yet your own. They are an advance paid on life. They hand you different scripts to try. They rehearse you. If you want entertainment, roll dice; then you can maintain your happy-go-lucky innocence. Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

Constant readers become writers at the point in life when they acquire a fascination with a process of falsification: with imposing shape while simulating the evolution of character and event, making determinations while fostering an illusion that in the next chapter anything might happen. A novelist spends a lifetime in the business of presenting what’s lifelike, but not like life.

Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. In 1922, Johns was working in London as an RAF recruiter. Into his office walked an inferior physical specimen with a strange air of moral superiority. It was T. E. Lawrence, looking to enlist under an alias.

These books are seldom found in a modern bookshop among the three-for-twos. Lost notions, forlorn phrases, time-worn ruminations, the received ideas and commonplaces of earlier times: these are what start new ideas growing.

It is characteristic of RIBs that they contain stories, examples and illustrations; they are generous books, overflowing any category you fit them in to, constantly exceeding your expectations.

Historically, the English have not bothered to define themselves. They just are. It is other people who, in their view, have the problem of definition.

My mother was a textile worker, as was her mother before her. As a small child, I grew up in what was essentially an Irish family, surrounded by Irish people who were old. By the time I was ten almost all of them were dead. My consciousness of being Irish seemed to die with them.

All these markers—descent, religion, region, accent—are quickly perceived and decoded by those who possess Englishness, and to this day they are used to exclude. You are forced off center. You are a provincial. You are a spectator. If you want to belong to Englishness, you must sell off aspects of your identity.

In my dreams of Europe, I had found the keys to the gate of an unknown city. For the constant and passionate imagination, no documents or passes are needed. It did not seem to me that I was writing of dead people or events that were distant and frozen. I was working at a transformative moment in the history of Europe. … By writing a novel one performs a revolutionary act. A novel is an act of hope. It allows us to imagine that things may be other than they are.

The creative imagination is a place of safety for the dead, where they can show their faces and be recognized. We have to conjure the people of the past, summon them back to life, so they can lead us to our future.

The god that artists must invoke is Janus, the double-faced god, the guardian of gates and doors. It is the duty and privilege of the novelist to look both outward and inward, to the past and the future, to the particular and the universal, to the parish and the world.

But Sanity, Madness and the Family is vivid, direct, gripping. It is a series of interviews with families, who each include one member who has spent time in psychiatric hospitals. Each interview is a novel or play in miniature.

If I wanted to be a writer, I didn’t have to worry about inventing material, I’d already got it. The next stage was just to find some words.

You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart.

For the first time an author was trusting me with the truth; it was there, for me, that the writing life began.

I assumed I’d wear my hair in a round perm, the color of steel and as tough. Think of the time I’d save; vanity is such a consumer of the hours.

In this world, men are not obliged to explain or account for themselves. Creatures endlessly to be placated, they look to mold a woman into a satisfactory, if not perfect, wife. Conrad Fleming seeks to mold Antonia. He is a man of unblemished conceit, immaculate selfishness. Young female readers today may view him with incredulity. They should not. He is faithfully recorded. He is the voice of the day before yesterday, and also the voice of the ages past.

Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now I will be funny.” It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.

There is a hierarchy of subject matter. Warfare should get more space than childbirth, though both are bloody. Burning the bodies rates higher than burning the cakes. If a woman engages with “masculine” subjects, it has not saved her from being trivialized; if a man descends to the domestic, writes fluently of love, marriage, children, he is praised for his empathy, his restraint; he is commended as intrepid, as if he had ventured among the savages to get secret knowledge.

Divorces and break-ups may damage the male writer, but the marks are read as battle scars. His overt actions may signal stupidity and lust, but the assumption is that at some covert level he acts to serve his art. A woman, it is assumed, does rash things because she can’t help it. She takes chances because she knows no better. She is judged and pitied, or judged and condemned. Judgments on her life contaminate judgments on her work.

Time has sanctified Austen, though there are still those who don’t see what the fuss is about. It helps that she was a good girl, with the tact to die young; with nothing to say about her private life and her heart guarded from examination, critics had to look at her text. Modern women have less tidy careers.

Cricket is the most ephemeral of arts. Blink, and you have missed some unique moment. Even a great actor can hope to reproduce his effects, because at least he will arrive again at the same place in his script, with the same line to say. But a batsman plays his stroke only once before it becomes history. A catch is in the air only long enough for you to see it (or not) before the moment of contact (or not) with the palm.

It is quite usual to think of the game in terms of dramatic spectacle, but in fact a year’s cricket, or a Test series, is even more like a novel than it is like a play. The number of characters is large. Their fortunes rise, fall, interweave. People who seemed likely to occupy a line or two decide to stick around and arrogate pages to themselves, perhaps whole strands of the plot. … Just as, in a novel, the fortunes of the protagonist may hang by a thread, or turn on an absurdity, so may the fortunes of a team; and behind the events from hour to hour a certain pattern emerges, which may be discernible only several years on.

Scents are not so much objects as performances, processes, but we lack a process for appraising them. … Could you review a scent as you review these art forms? Yes, I would argue. One word, for example, would sum up Beckham Signature: illiterate. Mitsouko would need a volume of essays.

Perfumes like this reorient us when life is gray.

The ideal scent keeps the wearer interested, evolves with him or her; you can’t “solve” it in one go like the plot of a bad detective novel. You need a perfect structure, like Chanel No. 5, to keep you safe; and then from time to time you need to subvert expectations, with something that cuts against your style and even your gender.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

In the end you must make a decision, but why not postpone it till the last possible point? Because once you have made the commitment, what you have written starts to look right. It gains a brutal ascendancy over you.

You must be able to loop back on yourself, and to be able to arrange the elements of which your story consists in an order that is entirely flexible. In the end you must make a decision, but why not postpone it till the last possible point? Because once you have made the commitment, what you have written starts to look right. It gains a brutal ascendancy over you.

As a teenage girl, Margot was taken to Martinique by a lover, who is said to have abandoned her there; somehow, she got herself back to France, became an actress, then manager of a string of provincial theaters. From her base in Versailles, she became a close friend of Marie Antoinette, but when the Bastille fell, she was on the road to Paris to become a good revolutionary; then, in turn, a counterrevolutionary. A steely chancer with a penchant for men many years her junior, she married at sixty-nine, and lived to be ninety.

In the haste of writing, carried along by the current of your own story, you make, I find, split-second decisions of huge consequence. Then when the whole thing has come together, you chew your metaphorical pencil over tiny points.

I am bowling along in a cab, on my way to a clinic to have a blood test, and my mind starts moving toward the later Henry VIII, and his poor health, and I wonder what it was like for his advisers to roll in for the morning strategy meeting and find him surrounded by his doctors. I take out my notebook and write: “Basin of blood. Urine flask. Holy Grail?”

What makes it startlingly modern is that events are conveyed through anecdote and dialogue, with turning points and dramatic highlights clicked into place; its language is direct and inventive; and the story it has to tell is fascinating, poignant and full of unexpected twists and turns.

When Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower she began to unravel; she talked wildly about her co-accused, repeated the words she had exchanged with them; desperate to make sense of her situation, she detailed public quarrels, the jealousies and infighting within her circle. Every word went back to Cromwell. He may not have had a case till Anne built it for him.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian’s chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

The events were happening now, in the present tense, unfolding as I watched, and what followed would be filtered through the main character’s sensibility. He seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me, with a slight ghostly overlap. It didn’t make sense to call him “Cromwell,” as if he were somewhere across the room. I called him “he.”

It was only when I began to explore the contest between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More that I realized I was writing the climax of a novel, not merely another chapter. The facts of history are plain enough, but the shape of the drama was late to emerge, and the triple structure later still. In my mind, the trilogy remains one long project, with its flickering patterns of light and dark, its mirrors and shadows. What I wanted to create is a story that reflects but never repeats, a sense of history listening and talking to itself.

It was then that the shock of the past reached out and jabbed me in the ribs. They were as alive as I am; why can’t I touch them? Grieved, I had to stuff my fingers in my mouth, fish out my handkerchief and do what a novelist has to do: unfreeze antique feeling, unlock the emotion stored and packed tight in paper, brick and stone.

It gives us a privileged view, as if we are with you in your chapel or writing closet: a way of looking that pierces the fog of misrepresentation, but allows us to see you with respect and in the light of the mercy we all need. Face to face, we can’t deny your flawed humanity. And if we admit to yours, why not ours?

Intellect burns through pale indoor skin, like a torch behind a paper screen. Concentration has furrowed your brow, the effort of containing multiple ironies. When you practiced as a lawyer, you used to let your gown trail off one shoulder; admirers copied you, making carelessness a cult. You’ve not shaved to meet the painter. No time, and you’d like to be thought above such niceties; you’re not vain, unless such nonchalance is a vanity in itself. Everything is in your lineaments—past and future—a whole eloquent biography.

George Orwell (there’s a man who might interest you) said that every life, viewed from the inside, is a series of defeats. I would amplify that, say it is a series of enforced compromises, slippages from our own standard: shabby little sins.

Yours is not a face that suggests an easy temper. Holbein shows us contained tension, willed constraint, subdued passion about to break out. Perplexed, you ask yourself, what should I do? How can I serve flesh and spirit? The point about our human nature is that we must go to work on it.

Proud of your family, you have Hans paint them, three generations clustered around you. You offer open house to wandering scholars. Friendship is one of your talents. You look like a man keen and merciless in argument, one who takes a deep and knowing pleasure in discomfiting his opponents.

Holbein is not the kind of painter who goes fishing for a man’s soul. His eye is meticulous, his technique formidable, and his concentration fixes on the telling details of the surface his subject chooses to show the world. A painter knows the art of concealment, and why one might choose to practice it.

Your later admirers have made you a liberal icon, a martyr for freedom of conscience. They see in you certain secular virtues that you would have despised as vices. You were not tolerant and would have thought it shameful to be so.

History is always stranger than we imagine or can imagine. It’s never black/white, it’s never either/or, it’s never “if a, therefore b.” The chains of causation snap when you breathe on them. Some iron assumptions are cobweb-thin. History is never tidy or shapely. It doesn’t have a dramatic arc.

It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons. I found it hard to see the man inside the clothes; and like Thomas Cromwell in my novels, I couldn’t help winding the fabric back onto the bolt and pricing him by the yard.

Glance sideways, into the wings, and you see the tacky preparations for the triumphant public event. You see your beautiful suit deconstructed, the tailor’s chalk lines, the unsecured seams. You see that your life is a charade, that the scenery is cardboard, that the paint is peeling, the red carpet fraying, and if you linger you will notice the oily devotion fade from the faces of your subjects

The faculty of awe remains intact, for all that the royal story in recent years has taken a sordid turn. … But a new world began, I think, in 1980, with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs. … A sort of licentiousness took hold, a national lip-smacking. Those gangling limbs were artlessly exposed, without her permission. It was the first violation.

Now we know the body in the Leicester car park is indeed that of Richard III, we have to concede the curved spine was not Tudor propaganda, but we need not believe the chronicler who claimed Richard was the product of a two-year pregnancy and was born with teeth.

We have arrived at the crux of the matter: a royal lady is a royal vagina. Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.

Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist’s head.