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It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 6
Essayist
Film Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Hilary Mary Thompson
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel
First
Male
Impersonator
Males
Impersonators
Woman
Thatcher
Become
Margaret
Women
Minister
Might
Unfortunate
Firsts
Ministers
Come
Prime

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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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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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You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
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When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
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I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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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 weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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