After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell.
Antonia Fraser

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

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.
Antonia Fraser

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

I don't like it, but this afternoon I've told myself I am going to go and get a dress.
Antonia Fraser

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

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

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
Antonia Fraser

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

I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.
Antonia Fraser


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

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

I'm glad I was never an heiress.
Antonia Fraser

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

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

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

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

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.
Antonia Fraser

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

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.
Antonia Fraser