Doing the rounds of literary festivals of late, Antonia Fraser is regularly asked what she refers to, with a winning smile, as a “loving” question. “Lady Antonia, are you still writing?” At 85, a widow for almost a decade since the death of her second husband, the Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter, and with a long line of best-sellers stretching back 50 years to the publication of her still celebrated biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, I suppose the festival-goers’ curiosity is understandable. But Fraser’s standard reply is unambiguous. “I say, ‘I like writing history. It’s what I do.’”