Occupation: Writer Birth: October 27, 1950
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria..
In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper..
Anti-Semitism is extremely common..
Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed..
The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists..
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for ….
I wanted passionately to be a priest..
IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated..
In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to th….
I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help..
If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in th….
Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me..
I had lost faith in biography..
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not..
One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clo….
History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines..
My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and rela….
In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather ch….
In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being op….
I don't write books inadvertently..
It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerf….