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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

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
Concern
Less
Colonial
Power
Fading
Monarchy
Grandeur
Onto
Hang
Attempt

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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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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
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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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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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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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No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
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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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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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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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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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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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