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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

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
Housewife
Prudent
Knew
Talking
Always
Thatcher
Margaret

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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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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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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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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
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What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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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.
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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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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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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Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
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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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