01c. 1987 ADI know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased— it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe’s heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
02c. 1987 AD1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
03c. 1987 ADAnd if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
04c. 1987 ADI make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
05c. 1987 ADThe way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
06c. 1987 ADThe reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
07c. 1987 ADI aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
08c. 1987 ADImagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
09c. 1987 ADOnce you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
10c. 1987 ADI said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
11c. 1987 ADYou can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
12c. 1987 ADYour love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
13c. 1987 ADHow many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
14c. 1987 ADYou know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
16c. 1987 ADNo man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
17c. 1987 ADEvery time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
18c. 1987 AD... those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
19c. 1987 ADIf Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
20c. 1987 ADHe draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
21c. 1987 ADBut you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.''I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
22c. 1987 ADHe is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
23c. 1987 ADHe finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
24c. 1987 ADAs More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
