Mantel’s life is an exceptional case, but I think many of us will recognise the experience she was describing. Historic houses invite us to let our imaginations wander. They are history we can walk through, and the fiction is left to us. I have always loved to visit. I know intimately the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace, the bathroom of Ham House, the basement kitchen of Anne of Cleves House and so many more shadowy corners of these grand places. But writing my first novel, May We Feed the King, which centres on a reclusive curator commissioned to arrange scenes in historic buildings, invited me to look at them in a slightly different way. What gives a big old house that transportive quality, of having plucked you from your surroundings and deposited you in a room that still feels alive?