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?

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 13