She saw that supreme dignity – and love – lay in tolerance.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle – that is to say nowhere.

I’m glad I was never an heiress.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women’s history.

She might be furious at such things, jealous too on a purely human level; but she would never consider that the position of mistress could or would be converted into that of wife. That to Isabella – or her daughter – was quite unthinkable.

I think there’s a tremendous split between people who’ve been through a war and people who haven’t.

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.

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.

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.

Of course there’s no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.