“It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.”

“Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...”

“But what happens when her beauty is torn from her like a cover from a book? Will he care to read her then, although her pages speak of nothing but love for him?”

“The novel since its origins has been the privatization of history... the history of private life ... and in that sense every novel is an historical novel....”

“She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look.”

“Whether I like it or not, most of my images of what various historical periods feel, smell, or sound like were acquired well before I set foot in any history class. They came from Margaret Mitchell, from Anya Seton, from M.M. Kaye, and a host of other authors, in their crackly plastic library bindings. Whether historians acknowledge it or not, scholarly history’s illegitimate cousin, the historical novel, plays a profound role in shaping widely held conceptions of historical realities.”