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

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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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[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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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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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
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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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For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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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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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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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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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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