0:00:13 > 0:00:18We've come to think of Hilary Mantel as a historical novelist.
0:00:18 > 0:00:22The phenomenal success of her books Wolf Hall
0:00:22 > 0:00:26and Bring Up The Bodies has made her famous.
0:00:26 > 0:00:28She's been made a dame.
0:00:28 > 0:00:32Both of these vivid resurrections of the Tudor past
0:00:32 > 0:00:34won the Man Booker Prize.
0:00:34 > 0:00:36They've topped best-seller lists,
0:00:36 > 0:00:40been turned into plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company,
0:00:40 > 0:00:42enjoyed sell-out West End runs.
0:00:42 > 0:00:46A BBC dramatisation of Wolf Hall will air next year.
0:00:48 > 0:00:51But in Mantel's hands, history is a slippery thing.
0:00:51 > 0:00:54Some of her other books live not in the past,
0:00:54 > 0:00:58but in a mock-Tudor present that is surprisingly tense.
0:00:58 > 0:01:02In novels such as Every Day Is Mother's Day
0:01:02 > 0:01:06and Beyond Black, she's neatly skewered suburbia.
0:01:07 > 0:01:12Now, the world awaits the third volume in the Wolf Hall series.
0:01:12 > 0:01:15BELLS PEAL
0:01:15 > 0:01:17In the meantime,
0:01:17 > 0:01:18Hilary's given us this -
0:01:18 > 0:01:22a collection of ten short stories provocatively titled
0:01:22 > 0:01:25The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher.
0:01:27 > 0:01:31The title story of the collection takes its starting point
0:01:31 > 0:01:35from a day in 1983, when the then Prime Minister - Margaret Thatcher -
0:01:35 > 0:01:40visited a private hospital in Windsor for a minor eye operation.
0:01:40 > 0:01:44NEWSREADER: As she emerged from the hospital, Mrs Thatcher seemed to
0:01:44 > 0:01:47hesitate for a moment as if readjusting to daylight.
0:01:47 > 0:01:49She'll need to wear dark glasses for a few days
0:01:49 > 0:01:51to protect her from bright lights.
0:01:53 > 0:01:56At the time, Hilary was living in Windsor,
0:01:56 > 0:01:58in a house with a view of the hospital car park.
0:02:01 > 0:02:02"Picture first
0:02:02 > 0:02:05"the street where she breathed her last.
0:02:07 > 0:02:09"It is a quiet street...
0:02:10 > 0:02:12"..sedate, shaded by old trees...
0:02:14 > 0:02:17"..a street of tall houses, their facades
0:02:17 > 0:02:19"smooth as white icing,
0:02:19 > 0:02:22"their brickwork the colour of honey.
0:02:24 > 0:02:27"Some are Georgian, flat fronted.
0:02:27 > 0:02:31"Others are Victorian, with gleaming bays.
0:02:31 > 0:02:33"They're too big for modern households,
0:02:33 > 0:02:37"and most of them have been cut up into flats.
0:02:37 > 0:02:41"But this does not destroy their elegance of proportion,
0:02:41 > 0:02:45"nor detract from the deep lustre of panelled front doors,
0:02:45 > 0:02:49"brass furnished and painted in navy or forest green.
0:02:51 > 0:02:54"It's the neighbourhood's only drawback that there are more cars
0:02:54 > 0:02:57"than spaces to put them."
0:03:01 > 0:03:04In this story - The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher -
0:03:04 > 0:03:07you posit the idea that, in 1983,
0:03:07 > 0:03:12an IRA man comes into a house in Windsor
0:03:12 > 0:03:17and potentially lines up to assassinate Mrs Thatcher.
0:03:17 > 0:03:20Mm. Why are you telling this story?
0:03:20 > 0:03:24Because I saw it happen, or I DIDN'T see it happen!
0:03:25 > 0:03:32I stood there at the moment, at the window - very much as described -
0:03:32 > 0:03:36saw Mrs Thatcher emerge from the building next door.
0:03:38 > 0:03:40And then two things go on,
0:03:40 > 0:03:45one is you are immediately in the body of a man with a gun
0:03:45 > 0:03:49and your eyes measuring the distance. And the other thing is
0:03:49 > 0:03:54you are in your writer's self and you think, "This is a story.
0:03:54 > 0:03:55"But where to find it?"
0:03:55 > 0:03:59It's taken me all these years to find the shape of the story.
0:03:59 > 0:04:03And yet I knew immediately - there's a challenge.
0:04:03 > 0:04:07Hilary, not everyone looking out of a room of their flat in Windsor,
0:04:07 > 0:04:11seeing Mrs Thatcher coming towards a group of doctors and nurses,
0:04:11 > 0:04:12would think about assassinating her.
0:04:14 > 0:04:17There are plenty of people who would.
0:04:17 > 0:04:21If you can rewind to the mood of 1983.
0:04:21 > 0:04:23And were you one of them?
0:04:23 > 0:04:29Well, what I do remember is a sobering, sensible, Windsor matron
0:04:29 > 0:04:32putting down her bag of shopping on the wall and saying,
0:04:32 > 0:04:35"I hate her. I HATE her."
0:04:35 > 0:04:41So, as a writer, whatever your personal feelings are,
0:04:41 > 0:04:45you want to know what is behind such a strong reaction.
0:04:46 > 0:04:53And that is why I knew I must write the story, I must explore that.
0:04:56 > 0:05:00The IRA assassin gains access to the woman's flat.
0:05:01 > 0:05:05She realises what his intentions are, and that she agrees with them.
0:05:05 > 0:05:09She shows him a way he can leave the flat covertly
0:05:09 > 0:05:12after firing his shot - a door.
0:05:14 > 0:05:16"Beyond the fire door he melts,
0:05:16 > 0:05:19"and this is how you've never seen him on the news.
0:05:19 > 0:05:21"This is how you don't know
0:05:21 > 0:05:23"his name, his face.
0:05:23 > 0:05:27"This is how, to your certain knowledge,
0:05:27 > 0:05:29"Mrs Thatcher went on living till she died.
0:05:31 > 0:05:34"But note the door: note the wall:
0:05:34 > 0:05:39"note the power of the door in the wall that you never saw was there.
0:05:40 > 0:05:43"And note the cold wind that blows through it,
0:05:43 > 0:05:46"when you open it a crack.
0:05:46 > 0:05:49"History could always have been otherwise.
0:05:51 > 0:05:55"For there is the time, the place, the black opportunity:...
0:05:56 > 0:06:00"..the day, the hour, the slant of the light,
0:06:00 > 0:06:06"the ice-cream van chiming from a distant road near the bypass."
0:06:06 > 0:06:10ICE-CREAM VAN CHIMES
0:06:13 > 0:06:18Today, that Windsor hospital is being converted into flats.
0:06:18 > 0:06:22And I'm sitting outside, in my car, thinking.
0:06:23 > 0:06:28The story rises to a climax, but refuses to end.
0:06:28 > 0:06:31It leaves us with the nightmarish possibility that somehow
0:06:31 > 0:06:34it all might have happened.
0:06:34 > 0:06:37A shot. A death.
0:06:37 > 0:06:38A different history.
0:06:40 > 0:06:42What would have happened if,
0:06:42 > 0:06:45instead of some rather boring news footage,
0:06:45 > 0:06:48Britain had its very own Zapruder footage,
0:06:48 > 0:06:55I suppose, of an assassination of a serving prime minister in 1983?
0:06:57 > 0:07:00And how would our society have been different?
0:07:00 > 0:07:02How would we have lived differently?
0:07:02 > 0:07:05How would our history have been seen differently
0:07:05 > 0:07:08if a matter of a moment,
0:07:08 > 0:07:11a matter of a few seconds, had changed everything?
0:07:13 > 0:07:15And that's what I think Hilary Mantel is about.
0:07:15 > 0:07:17It's about alternatives.
0:07:17 > 0:07:19Different ways of seeing history
0:07:19 > 0:07:22and also different ways of seeing reality,
0:07:22 > 0:07:25a different way of thinking about history and reality.
0:07:31 > 0:07:33"Who has not seen the door in the wall?
0:07:34 > 0:07:37"It is the invalid child's consolation,
0:07:37 > 0:07:40"the prisoner's last hope.
0:07:40 > 0:07:43"It is the easy exit for the dying man,
0:07:43 > 0:07:46"who perishes not in the death-grip of a rattling gasp,
0:07:46 > 0:07:51"but passes on a sigh, like a falling feather.
0:07:51 > 0:07:57"It is a special door and obeys no laws that govern wood or iron.
0:07:57 > 0:08:01"No locksmith can defeat it, no bailiff kick it in,
0:08:01 > 0:08:03"patrolling policemen pass it,
0:08:03 > 0:08:08"because it is visible only to the eye of faith.
0:08:08 > 0:08:10"Once through it,
0:08:10 > 0:08:15"you return as angles and air, as sparks and flame."
0:08:21 > 0:08:24In your fiction, there's often a door
0:08:24 > 0:08:28that opens out into other possibilities.
0:08:28 > 0:08:31And when we go through the door marked "Mantel",
0:08:31 > 0:08:33we don't really know where we're going.
0:08:33 > 0:08:37All we know is we're going to be challenged and threatened and...
0:08:37 > 0:08:41Mantel doesn't know where we're going either! That's the point.
0:08:41 > 0:08:43Why the door?
0:08:43 > 0:08:45Why are there lots of doors in your work?
0:08:47 > 0:08:53Yes. And the image of the door in the wall.
0:08:53 > 0:08:57It isn't a question of always of liberation
0:08:57 > 0:09:01into a world of possibilities.
0:09:01 > 0:09:06You may find you've...you've just passed through into a mirror world.
0:09:09 > 0:09:11So the symbol's equivocal...
0:09:13 > 0:09:17..and the step into the unknown is what is important,
0:09:17 > 0:09:20the courage needed.
0:09:20 > 0:09:24And the question is not just what lies on the other side
0:09:24 > 0:09:29of the door, but will I be different as I step over the threshold?
0:09:30 > 0:09:34The answer might be simple - yes, it will, because you're dead.
0:09:34 > 0:09:37It might be the frontier between life and death,
0:09:37 > 0:09:42but it might be the frontier between obscurity and fame.
0:09:45 > 0:09:52It might be really any number of...
0:09:52 > 0:09:55of...of choices of...
0:09:55 > 0:09:58this question of roads not taken.
0:09:58 > 0:10:02I've used that...that metaphor also.
0:10:02 > 0:10:03Um...
0:10:05 > 0:10:10People not even born. It's not always a question of the dead,
0:10:10 > 0:10:12but I say in my memoir:
0:10:12 > 0:10:17"When the midwife says it's a girl, where does the boy go?"
0:10:20 > 0:10:24When people think of names for their children before they are born,
0:10:24 > 0:10:28who occupies the unused names?
0:10:28 > 0:10:32These are all questions of frontiers, borders.
0:10:33 > 0:10:37And I think, in those short stories,
0:10:37 > 0:10:41say, in The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher,
0:10:41 > 0:10:45people are crossing borders of various types
0:10:45 > 0:10:48in the different stories.
0:10:51 > 0:10:53That's true.
0:10:53 > 0:10:57In this collection, children climb over fences uninvited.
0:10:57 > 0:11:00A flirtation drifts towards adultery.
0:11:00 > 0:11:04But the border that draws Hilary's eye most often
0:11:04 > 0:11:08is the one between life and death.
0:11:08 > 0:11:12The mortality figures in these pages are alarmingly high.
0:11:12 > 0:11:15And once the dead are dead, how dead are they?
0:11:18 > 0:11:20I wonder if we could talk about one story
0:11:20 > 0:11:21in this new collection particularly,
0:11:21 > 0:11:25which is Terminus, which begins with a woman
0:11:25 > 0:11:30seeing her dead father on a train as it's leaving a station?
0:11:30 > 0:11:35I think for short fiction I seem pathetically dependent on
0:11:35 > 0:11:37what really does happen to me.
0:11:37 > 0:11:41It seems to be far closer to my life
0:11:41 > 0:11:45in derivation than my novels do.
0:11:45 > 0:11:47So, yes, it did happen.
0:11:47 > 0:11:49You saw your father? Look sideways
0:11:49 > 0:11:56and see a man in an apparently...empty carriage
0:11:56 > 0:11:59and just think, "Good God, that's my father."
0:11:59 > 0:12:03Not as I left him, but in some sort of...
0:12:06 > 0:12:08..intermediate state of being.
0:12:08 > 0:12:15And the face looked - if you can understand me - in itself haunted.
0:12:15 > 0:12:17So it was a ghost that was haunted.
0:12:19 > 0:12:25And I then - like the woman in the story - went into London,
0:12:25 > 0:12:30went to a meeting and thought, on my way home,
0:12:30 > 0:12:35looking around at Waterloo Station...
0:12:37 > 0:12:40.."Well, if there can be one dead person, maybe they're all dead.
0:12:42 > 0:12:43"How do I know?"
0:12:43 > 0:12:46PASSENGER ANNOUNCEMENT: The train currently at...
0:12:49 > 0:12:52"For how many of all these surging thousands"
0:12:52 > 0:12:54"are solid,
0:12:54 > 0:12:57"and how many of these assumptions are tricks of the light?
0:12:59 > 0:13:03"How many, I ask you, are connected at all points,
0:13:03 > 0:13:07"how many are utterly and convincingly in the state
0:13:07 > 0:13:10"they purport to be: which is, alive?
0:13:13 > 0:13:15"That lost, objectless, sallow man,
0:13:15 > 0:13:18"a foreigner with his bag on his back,
0:13:18 > 0:13:24"that woman whose starved face recalls a plague-pit victim?
0:13:25 > 0:13:28"Those dwellers in the brown houses of Wandsworth,
0:13:28 > 0:13:33"those denizens of balcony flats and walkways, those grumbling commuters
0:13:33 > 0:13:38"gathered for Virginia Water, those whose homes perch on embankments,
0:13:38 > 0:13:44"or whose roofs glossy with rain fly away from the traveller's window?
0:13:44 > 0:13:45"How many?
0:13:47 > 0:13:49"For distinguish me, will you?
0:13:50 > 0:13:53"Distinguish me 'the distinguished thing'.
0:13:55 > 0:13:58"Render me the texture of flesh.
0:13:58 > 0:14:01"Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice,
0:14:01 > 0:14:04"that marks out the living from the dead.
0:14:04 > 0:14:09"Show me a bone that you know to be a living bone.
0:14:09 > 0:14:14"Flourish it, will you? Find one, and show me."
0:14:21 > 0:14:26It was one of the few occasions where you sit down, write it...
0:14:28 > 0:14:30..put down your pen and it's done.
0:14:30 > 0:14:35And, actually, it's strange in its style,
0:14:35 > 0:14:40it's strange in its rhythms but it had to be left just so.
0:14:40 > 0:14:43Not something you could get into and say,
0:14:43 > 0:14:46"Well, I'll just tweak this a little."
0:14:46 > 0:14:52It is as it is. And that's not my usual process, as I've told you.
0:14:53 > 0:14:56This was an idea to pin down something fleeting perhaps?
0:14:57 > 0:14:58Yes. I think...
0:15:01 > 0:15:06..it was to interrogate this mysterious moment.
0:15:06 > 0:15:12Not to try to resolve it, just to live with the idea it'd implanted,
0:15:12 > 0:15:16which is the idea that when you look around you,
0:15:16 > 0:15:19how can you be sure what really distinguishes
0:15:19 > 0:15:21the living from the dead?
0:15:25 > 0:15:29"It's not generally agreed, it's not much appreciated,
0:15:29 > 0:15:33"that people are divided by all sorts of things,
0:15:33 > 0:15:35"and that, frankly, death is the least of them.
0:15:37 > 0:15:42"When lights are blossoming out across the boulevards and parks,
0:15:42 > 0:15:49"and the town assumes its Victorian sagesse, I shall be moving on again.
0:15:49 > 0:15:52"I see that both the living and the dead commute,
0:15:52 > 0:15:54"riding their familiar trains.
0:15:55 > 0:15:57"I am not, as you will have gathered,
0:15:57 > 0:16:03"a person who needs false excitement, or simulated innovation.
0:16:03 > 0:16:06"I am willing, though, to tear up the timetable
0:16:06 > 0:16:10"and take some new routes, and I know I shall find,
0:16:10 > 0:16:16"at some unlikely terminus, a hand that is meant to rest in mine."
0:16:18 > 0:16:21PASSENGER ANNOUNCEMENT: Customers who are now boarding...
0:16:25 > 0:16:28These stories deprive us of our certainties.
0:16:28 > 0:16:32The dead and the living are indistinguishable.
0:16:32 > 0:16:34You can't be sure what you've seen.
0:16:35 > 0:16:39In How Shall I Know You? a writer stays in a provincial hotel,
0:16:39 > 0:16:43suffering from a migraine, and I can't help wondering.
0:16:46 > 0:16:47I wanted to ask you about migraines.
0:16:47 > 0:16:50Because, in one of your short stores for example,
0:16:50 > 0:16:55a character has a migraine and there is a sort of migrainous imagination
0:16:55 > 0:16:59at work in your fiction, I think, where things are slightly skewed.
0:16:59 > 0:17:01Do you suffer from migraines? Well, I did.
0:17:01 > 0:17:02Um...
0:17:04 > 0:17:06I think...
0:17:07 > 0:17:08..the...
0:17:08 > 0:17:11Well, I could certainly say the problem's considerably eased
0:17:11 > 0:17:14and I...
0:17:16 > 0:17:19..I sometimes now find myself, interestingly...
0:17:21 > 0:17:25..in the aura that precedes a migraine attack
0:17:25 > 0:17:29without actually getting to the headache part.
0:17:29 > 0:17:31But, yes, I mean you are quite right.
0:17:31 > 0:17:35I-I-I think I've said somewhere that migraine is
0:17:35 > 0:17:40an art form that I didn't recognise at one stage.
0:17:40 > 0:17:44It is... It's a very mysterious condition
0:17:44 > 0:17:47and I think that...
0:17:50 > 0:17:53..there are probably more aspects to it,
0:17:53 > 0:17:58more triggers for it than, you know, people commonly recognise.
0:17:58 > 0:18:00It isn't just a bad headache.
0:18:00 > 0:18:02No, it affects your whole vision and the way you see things.
0:18:02 > 0:18:04Oh, but much more than that.
0:18:04 > 0:18:09There's a whole diversity of neurological symptoms.
0:18:09 > 0:18:12One of the ones I've found most interesting over the years,
0:18:12 > 0:18:16distressing but also interesting,
0:18:16 > 0:18:21is the sense of having a presence on my left-hand side,
0:18:21 > 0:18:25approximately were you had your guardian angel
0:18:25 > 0:18:26when you were a child.
0:18:28 > 0:18:32And, though oppressive...
0:18:34 > 0:18:36..it does give your life,
0:18:36 > 0:18:40um, a sensation of...doubleness,
0:18:40 > 0:18:43a sort of haunted quality.
0:18:43 > 0:18:48You are not sure, you see, whether that presence is something else
0:18:48 > 0:18:53or is it you slightly slipped out of focus?
0:18:53 > 0:18:55It feels like both.
0:18:55 > 0:18:59Then the attack's over and it's not there any more.
0:18:59 > 0:19:03But for a writer, you see, it's gold.
0:19:03 > 0:19:07The more you're suffering, the better it's going to be on the page.
0:19:14 > 0:19:18It shouldn't surprise us at all that these ten short stories
0:19:18 > 0:19:22bear close relationships to the novels that Hilary Mantel
0:19:22 > 0:19:24has published in the last 30 years.
0:19:26 > 0:19:30They open doors back into those longer fictions.
0:19:30 > 0:19:33In Beyond Black the migraines and the lively dead
0:19:33 > 0:19:37come together in the character of the psychic medium, Alison.
0:19:37 > 0:19:43The uncouth ghosts who visit her manifest as migraines do - with
0:19:43 > 0:19:48a flick, a glint in the peripheral vision that glows and grows.
0:19:51 > 0:19:54And one of those ghosts that visits her is Lady Diana.
0:19:59 > 0:20:06"At once Diana manifested: a blink in the hall mirror, a twinkle.
0:20:06 > 0:20:11"Within a moment she had become a definite pinkish glow.
0:20:12 > 0:20:17"She was wearing her wedding dress, and it hung on her now,
0:20:17 > 0:20:22"she was gaunt, and it looked crumpled and worn,
0:20:22 > 0:20:25"as if dragged through the halls of the hereafter,
0:20:25 > 0:20:28"where the housekeeping, understandably,
0:20:28 > 0:20:30"is never of the best.
0:20:30 > 0:20:34"She'd pinned some of her press cuttings to her skirt,
0:20:34 > 0:20:39"they lifted, in some other-worldly breeze, and flapped.
0:20:39 > 0:20:44"She consulted them, lifting her skirts and peering,
0:20:44 > 0:20:49"but, in Alison's opinion, her eyes seemed to cross.
0:20:51 > 0:20:55"'Give my love to my boys,' Diana said.
0:20:55 > 0:20:59" 'My boys, I'm sure you know who I mean.' "
0:21:02 > 0:21:05I'm interested in these stories, and in Beyond Black,
0:21:05 > 0:21:08because they deal with more recent history.
0:21:08 > 0:21:11In Beyond Black, you talk about the unimaginable thing that was
0:21:11 > 0:21:16the death of Princess Diana and how she haunts the present
0:21:16 > 0:21:19and haunts the living who remain.
0:21:19 > 0:21:22Is it more difficult or more interesting
0:21:22 > 0:21:25to write about contemporary history than the Tudors, say?
0:21:27 > 0:21:30I haven't done it in a big way, you see.
0:21:30 > 0:21:36Mrs Thatcher enters the short story simply as the target.
0:21:36 > 0:21:39She's seen but she does not speak.
0:21:41 > 0:21:46Diana enters Beyond Black as a ghost.
0:21:46 > 0:21:53I haven't in a bigger way engaged with contemporary figures
0:21:53 > 0:21:57because...it's like journalism.
0:21:57 > 0:21:58I don't know.
0:21:58 > 0:22:03You see, I think you need a longer view, you need perspective,
0:22:03 > 0:22:07it needs to turn into history.
0:22:07 > 0:22:11It's not to say I'd never do it, but it has its own set of challenges.
0:22:11 > 0:22:14I mean, you wouldn't do Churchill or Blair, for example?
0:22:16 > 0:22:19I wouldn't feel constrained from doing it.
0:22:19 > 0:22:23It's just that that novel hasn't happened yet.
0:22:23 > 0:22:27There are only certain people you can work with, you know?
0:22:27 > 0:22:30That's like a biographer choosing a subject,
0:22:30 > 0:22:35or like making a friend in real life.
0:22:35 > 0:22:37If you're going to write a novel about someone,
0:22:37 > 0:22:41you have to be sure that your working partnership
0:22:41 > 0:22:44can continue for some years.
0:22:44 > 0:22:47So it's not a thing to choose lightly.
0:22:48 > 0:22:52You talked about that migrainous imagination
0:22:52 > 0:22:56and that whole issue of seeing things and feeling that presence.
0:22:59 > 0:23:03I've known you for a relatively long time now
0:23:03 > 0:23:08and you are the most well I've ever seen and known you.
0:23:08 > 0:23:09Mm...
0:23:10 > 0:23:14Is that all right? Do you miss being ill, as a writer?
0:23:16 > 0:23:21There are a variety of ways to give yourself a really hard time,
0:23:21 > 0:23:24to make sure that you suffer adequately.
0:23:24 > 0:23:27And one of them is to take all the hours
0:23:27 > 0:23:30that you used to spend being ill
0:23:30 > 0:23:37and make sure you work yourself in to a state of quivering fatigue.
0:23:38 > 0:23:43Actually, to be serious, what I've done with my abundant good health...
0:23:44 > 0:23:49..comparatively speaking over the last few months,
0:23:49 > 0:23:52is to set myself an even bigger agenda,
0:23:52 > 0:23:55take on more and more projects.
0:23:55 > 0:23:58I have more books planned. I have plays planned.
0:23:59 > 0:24:05I feel really, in some respects, as if I'm beginning again.
0:24:05 > 0:24:07But you're not a woman who believes in endings,
0:24:07 > 0:24:08you always believe in beginnings.
0:24:08 > 0:24:10Well, that's, er...
0:24:11 > 0:24:13..that's how one of our plays ends.
0:24:13 > 0:24:15You know, if you think this is an ending
0:24:15 > 0:24:20you are deceived as to its nature - it's a beginning.
0:24:20 > 0:24:23So, that's how I'm regarding this present phase.
0:24:25 > 0:24:30"Summer 1536: he is promoted Baron Cromwell.
0:24:31 > 0:24:37"He cannot call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney. He might laugh.
0:24:37 > 0:24:43"However. He can call himself Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon.
0:24:43 > 0:24:46"He ranged all over those fields, when he was a boy.
0:24:48 > 0:24:53"The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair.
0:24:55 > 0:24:59"It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen,
0:24:59 > 0:25:04"and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin.
0:25:05 > 0:25:07"There are no endings.
0:25:07 > 0:25:12"If you think so you are deceived as to their nature.
0:25:12 > 0:25:14"They are all beginnings.
0:25:16 > 0:25:17"Here is one."
0:25:21 > 0:25:27You've crossed a recent border into fame. How has that affected you?
0:25:31 > 0:25:34It seems as though it is happening to somebody else really.
0:25:34 > 0:25:36I wonder whether you write the story
0:25:36 > 0:25:39The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher -
0:25:39 > 0:25:43a very provocatively titled collection of short stories -
0:25:43 > 0:25:46to resist becoming a national treasure?
0:25:49 > 0:25:53It's worrying - the national treasure label.
0:25:53 > 0:25:56It suggests an unchallenging cosiness.
0:25:56 > 0:25:58We don't want that.
0:26:00 > 0:26:02It's...well meant...
0:26:04 > 0:26:09..but as soon as people begin to posit that,
0:26:09 > 0:26:12you have to say to yourself, "Then what is this nation?
0:26:12 > 0:26:14"Is this nation all it should be?"
0:26:18 > 0:26:20There's a paradox here because...
0:26:22 > 0:26:28..it's offensive to hang on to the name of rebel
0:26:28 > 0:26:32after you've joined the establishment.
0:26:32 > 0:26:38It's pretentious to pretend to be marginal when you're at the centre.
0:26:38 > 0:26:43We're all familiar with the artist who wants to keep his street cred
0:26:43 > 0:26:51but lives behind an immaculate, manufactured, Georgian facade
0:26:51 > 0:26:53and bathes in champagne.
0:26:53 > 0:26:56It's so hollow, it's so pretentious,
0:26:56 > 0:26:58it really is offensive.
0:26:58 > 0:27:02You need to look at where you are and acknowledge it.
0:27:02 > 0:27:09And then, when you find yourself standing on that centre ground
0:27:09 > 0:27:11and all seems right and secure,
0:27:11 > 0:27:13that is the moment to pick up a spade
0:27:13 > 0:27:17and begin digging away the ground beneath your feet.
0:27:19 > 0:27:21Because you could have turned down being a dame, I suppose.
0:27:24 > 0:27:26But what would be the point of that?
0:27:27 > 0:27:31Well, you could've retained your marginal status.
0:27:31 > 0:27:33Well, I think if that was the only way you could do it
0:27:33 > 0:27:35it'd be pretty hollow,
0:27:35 > 0:27:38because people would think you were a dame anyway.
0:27:38 > 0:27:40Have you started behaving like a dame?
0:27:40 > 0:27:42Oh, definitely. Yes.
0:27:42 > 0:27:43Yes. Yes, I have.
0:27:43 > 0:27:45You've become grand. You can't be teased.
0:27:45 > 0:27:47I have become extremely grand.
0:27:47 > 0:27:50I refer to myself in the third person now.
0:27:50 > 0:27:53Dame Hilary's schedule is rather full.
0:27:53 > 0:27:56Well, you see, I said that is how you deal with it -
0:27:56 > 0:27:58you pretend it's happening to somebody else.
0:27:58 > 0:28:00I get up in the morning and I put on...
0:28:00 > 0:28:02I put on my dame face.
0:28:02 > 0:28:03I'm good to go!
0:28:03 > 0:28:07But that means you can't be teased any more!
0:28:07 > 0:28:08Oh, I don't know.
0:28:08 > 0:28:12I think you're doing it now and I think I'm doing it back.
0:28:14 > 0:28:15Right!
0:28:15 > 0:28:18And that pen you're holding, you're not going to put it down.
0:28:18 > 0:28:19No.
0:28:22 > 0:28:24I said a little while ago...
0:28:27 > 0:28:32.."Early in your life there's a phrase in your head -
0:28:32 > 0:28:35"choose your weapons."
0:28:35 > 0:28:36And this is it.
0:28:38 > 0:28:39Thank you.