Best 35 quotes of Antonia Fraser on MyQuotes

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

Her imperturbable self-confidence (Duchesse de Maine) caused Madame de Stael to write that the Duchesse believed in herself the same way she believed in God, without explanation or discussion.

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

I decided as usual that justice lay in the middle - that is to say nowhere.

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

I hate the only one of my book jackets when I was made up professionally, my hair made into a smooth bell.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all. marie antoinette

I love hearing details of writers' craft, as cannibals eat the brains of clever men to get cleverer.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

King Charles II liked women's company and well as making love to them.

Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.

Mary Queen of Scots was my first love, and that is always something special.

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.

My mother was a politician in my formative years.

My mother, who was quite sharp when I was young, became utterly mild.

Ninety-seven is my lucky number.

Normally I make myself swim, do exercises. For zest I like going to the cinema.

Of course there's no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God, if she exists.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Darnley, who, like Banquo's ghost, seemed to play a much more effective part in Scottish politics once he was dead than when he was alive.

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.

People cannot help their predilections, although they may conceal them.

She saw that supreme dignity - and love - lay in tolerance.

Though Charles II both craved and enjoyed female companionship till the end of his life, there is no question that by the cold, rainy autumn of 1682 his physical appetites had diminshed considerably. The Duchess of Portsmouth was, after all, more than twenty years his junior; and there comes a time in nearly every such relationship when the male partner is simply unable to fully accommodate the female partner. Or as Samuel Pepys tartly noted in his diary, "the king yawns much in council, it is thought he spends himself overmuch in the arms of Madame Louise, who far from being wearied, seems fresher than ever after sporting with the king.

Was Charles I too stubborn to listen to reason? Could Civil War have been averted if the king had been more willing to negotiate? His great enemy Cromwell always maintained that the king had been swayed at the last moment by his queen, the beautiful Henrietta Maria. We can believe Cromwell's claim that the queen told her husband to be firm. But the wicked, spiteful, altogether irresistable quote often attributed to her by Puritan writers of the time is almost certainly false. "Oh my love, if you cannot remain firm in the bedchamber, at least try to remain firm with your subjects!