In The Confession, you don’t write about the more obviously dramatic moments in the story: the deaths of Culpeper and Dereham, for example, or Katherine’s beheading. Why not?

It never occurred to me to put them in! I think – now that I’m thinking about it – that perhaps that’s because, well, a beheading is a beheading is a beheading. I mean, what would it show you? You know it happened to them, but that’s not their story. Their story – what’s individual to them – comes before that; it’s the story of their lives, not their deaths.