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….

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..

None of my books has been ever in my head; after they're finished, they go. It's like being a sort of medium; you just grab it when it's there then j….

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentatio….

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….

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the li….

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….

I had to paraphrase the paraphrase..

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 labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh..

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens..

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..

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..

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….

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

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death..

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

Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?.

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….

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

People are much more interesting than people realise..