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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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I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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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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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
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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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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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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
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