It's such a release to show yourself as not a charming person but just someone who is vulnerable.
I love writing about unknown people.
I couldn't find anybody who didn't light up when I rang and said I want to talk about Virginia Cherrill. I think she had this absolute purity of spirit.
It's time that we gave our children what we owe them, which is a richer understanding of the past and of the importance of all that Germany has done for England and that England has done for Germany.
In 20th-century poetry, Robert Graves is to love what Philip Larkin is to mortality.
I've always been of the party that rubbished the idea of a definitive account of somebody's life.
I was brought up by my father to think that the best thing in life was to be charming, to have a nice smile, always to be liked.
Thrumpton Hall can be thought of as a venerable old lady, ageing gracefully. But I didn't always feel this way. Children want more than anything to be very conventional and very normal, so it was excruciating and, at times, very upsetting to grow up in a house like this.
My brother and I shared an isolated area at the top of the house; we would clamber over the roof and gables and grow our imaginations. But it didn't feel ideal at the time.
