Antonia Fraser quotes:

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.

King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them.

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

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

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

I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.

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

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

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

Ninety-seven is my lucky number.

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

Of course there's no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.

Her imperturbable self-confidence (Duchesse de Maine) caused Madame de Stael to write that the Duchesse believed in herself the same way she believed in God, without explanation or discussion.

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

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

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

I'm glad I was never an heiress.

Darnley, who, like Banquo's ghost, seemed to play a much more effective part in Scottish politics once he was dead than when he was alive.

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.

My mother was a politician in my formative years.

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

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette

As the Dauphine stepped out of her carriage on to the ceremonial carpet that had been laid down, it was the Duc de Choiseul who was given the privilege of the first salute. Presented with the Duc by Prince Starhemberg, Marie Antoinette exclaimed: 'I shall never forget that you are responsible for my happiness!

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

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

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