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I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 6
Essayist
Film Critic
Literary Critic
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Poet Lawyer
Writer
Hilary Mary Thompson
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel
History
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Contempt
Moore
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Margaret
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Biographies
Unexamined

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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
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The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
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It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
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He turns to the painting. I fear Mark was right. Who is Mark? A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer. Gregory says, Did you not know?
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[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
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What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
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Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
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At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
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