I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not..

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me..

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive..

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no rea….

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines..

There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them..

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?.

Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?.

Freud was just a novelist..

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrati….

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawy….

I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical..

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character..

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….

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed..

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….

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..

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade..

And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the c….

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding..

I love soap operas - the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives - Jessica Fletcher, 'Columbo,' 'Pe….