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There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

History has repeated itself many times througout the ages.

Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.