Art & Creativity Quote by Antonia Fraser

Justice, in Antonia Fraser's world, is less a courtroom verdict than a narrative inevitability. The line has the cool snap of a writer admitting her real jurisdiction: not the state, but the page. "Just deserts" carries the moral comfort of balance restored, yet Fraser immediately undercuts the tidy civics lesson with "even if not at the hands of the police". The subtext is a quiet distrust of institutional closure. Law is procedural; story is surgical.

Fraser is best known for historical biography, but this sentiment channels the same sensibility that makes her histories feel novelistic: people are shaped, cornered, and ultimately answered for by consequence. In real life, the powerful evade, archives go silent, guilt disperses into systems. On the page, an author can tighten the net. That doesn't mean Fraser is advocating vigilantism; it's a confession of craft. She isn't promising punishment so much as resolution, the thing reality withholds. Readers want patterns, not paperwork.

Context matters: writing across periods where "the police" either didn't exist as we imagine them or existed as instruments of class and crown, Fraser knows legitimacy is historically contingent. The police are a modern symbol of order, but not the only mechanism societies use to enforce norms: scandal, exile, economic ruin, private revenge, the slow rot of reputation. Her sentence winks at all of that. It's also a defense of moral imagination. If biography is bound by evidence, fiction can still insist that actions land somewhere, even when the world shrugs.