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The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

I'm an eighteenth-century girl at heart. I wouldn't mind being set down in London in 1715, in the midst of all the drama of the Hanoverian succession.

What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.

To my three sons, Peter, Scott, and Alexander who pulled me from the 18th Century and back into the present on a regular basis and therefore made me a better person, thank you. And to my wife, who sits at the table there. Who is right about almost everything.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy.

I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.