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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.

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
Generations
Thatcher
Thing
Margaret
Made
Construct
Things
Accent
Constructs
Brit
Accents
Objectionable
Total
Falsity
Generation
Brits

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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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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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I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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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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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
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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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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
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Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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