Mrs Thatcher has told one of her interviewers that she had nothing to say to her mother after she reached the age of fifteen. Such a sad, blunt confession it seems, and yet not a few of us could make it. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. Hilary Mantel.

Ted shows me his school composition, a rewrite of Snow White from the point of view of the dwarves: ‘So you think we liked Snow White? You are completely WRONG.

I think some people wished I’d kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I’m doing it completely intellectually.

That’s one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

When, in the street, I see a mother walking with her grown-up daughter, I can hardly bear to witness the mother’s pride, the softening of her face, her incredulous joy at being granted her daughter’s company; and the iron discipline she imposes on herself, to muffle and conceal this joy.

It’s a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else’s life.

You’d die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you’d written. Somebody somewhere says that ‘the urge to preserve is the basis of all art’. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around, everyday with impunity, but because without it, you will lose your life, ts detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what’s happened – almost to calm themselves.

It’s disturbing at my age to look at a young woman’s destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one’s own destructiveness in youth.

Now, I – for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.