Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

We are privileged. There are poor people out there. We must to do something to make them privileged.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

I'm glad I was never an heiress.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

I don't like it, but this afternoon I've told myself I am going to go and get a dress.

I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.