Occupation: Biographer Birth: October 5, 1949
Freud was just a novelist..
Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I'm writing them. For instance, when I was writing 'Doctor Dee,' I believed in magic. And when I wrote 'Haw….
Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rio….
There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the A….
He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he though….
Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back..
It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?.
London' is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the hist….
The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentatio….
I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned..
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase..
You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through wh….
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed..
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them..
I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to say. I haven't. I've got nothing to say. My opin….
In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going o….
I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a f….
I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed..
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent..
Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommod….
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh..