IC: Dunkirk.

HM: Yes. The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.

IC: I am not sure Catholics have just been romanticized in England. They have been persecuted.

HM: Yes, of course. But people will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

IC: What is that experience of adaptation into theater like?

HM: When we began, there was only one book. What was actually commissioned was one play. Now that we have two plays, the complexities multiply. And then the Royal Shakespeare Company got involved. I’ve become more and more drawn into it.

At the same time as the play adaptations, the BBC adaptation has been marching forward. A different take on the material. I have been less involved with the television production than with the theater. But this is unique because it is a work in progress. I haven’t finished the third book. In this case, it is alive!

IC: Is it strange to see actors give their own spin to your characters?

HM: It helps hugely with the third book. The third book, in subtle ways, feeds back into the plays.

IC: It makes you think about the characters in different ways?

HM: It concentrates you on the present moment. It also reminds me, watching it, that characters did not know their fate.

IC: They must have had some sense, dealing with Henry VIII.

HM: That was a tricky business. You might think you can outlive him. Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

IC: Speaking of process, I am curious what the step is between historical research and then writing fiction from that.

HM: For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot. One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely well documented, they are not known. A king might be well documented but not everyone.

IC: So you feel like you have more license if we don’t have the facts?

HM: Yes, but it is not favored. The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is. [laughs] I am not a historian. I don’t see what I do as being a rival to biography. It’s complementary. It’s fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations will have a root somewhere.

IC: I am going to make up things you said for this interview based on things you said previously. Fill in the gaps.

HM: But you have me here to ask any question you like!

IC: We have been talking about monarchy, but you lived in a non-constitutional one, in Saudi Arabia, in the 1980s. And one of your stories takes place there.

HM: What a wonderful opportunity! How many people in the present day have the chance to not only live in an absolute monarchy but in a theocracy? They were domestic circumstances. It was like a Gothic novel if you are a woman. When I landed at King Abdullah International Airport at three a.m. for the first time, I thought, I am going to get a book out of this. I hadn’t published anything, but I knew. That’s what made me able to stand it. We got to live in a flat in the city. That meant we got to see society.

IC: When 9/11 happened, did you feel like you had a different perspective than other people?

HM: I thought totally so. I have a great and genuine respect for Islam, which I got when I was there. But I also saw the tendencies that led to war against the West. That was in every conversation.

IC: Where do you think it comes from?

HM: It comes from quite primitive impulses. Where does anti-Semitism come from? To see the vile cartoons in the Arab press ... The Holocaust denial. You have maps and Israel isn’t on them! That is institutional, it is official. The information that people had about the West was so heavily distorted. Of course it comes as a shock, however much you know it theoretically. It’s an education. It’s beliefs about women and law and morality and society. It was quite fascinating. You can’t get it out of books. You have to have the conversations.

IC: I was going to ask about other historical novelists you might like. In the last fifty years or so, Norman Mailer has tried it. Gore Vidal.

HM: My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre. People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn’t want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England. I loved Gore Vidal’s Burr. That book gave me courage. Thomas Keneally, the Australian author.

IC: What other writers and essayists have you been influenced by? You also write essays.

HM: When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do. The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett. Usually saying this ends a conversation.

IC: I am going to leave.

HM: I couldn’t get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don’t read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention. If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of her books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back. In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

IC: I heard a story that you were at a literary event with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and Ian McEwan. And Hitchens said that he stood in a corner being social only with his friends and that he felt so embarrassed afterward. He said he acted like a high-schooler.

HM: Oh, bless him. It was a very funny conference. I knew him before that. He had always been a good angel to me. He once stole a phrase from me that came out of his mouth on television. I saw his eyes move sideways. I thought, It’s alright, you can have it! The conference was light on women. Salman Rushdie showed up, they were doing their own thing. I didn’t feel neglected!

They took us on a walk for miles and miles. It was a themed garden. Hitchens was so unfit that he kept trying to take shortcuts. It was like Alice in Wonderland, because he would appear on top of a hill and realize he was on the wrong side of a river or in the wrong place. I remember the helplessness on his face. I was rather fond of him.