Occupation: Biographer Birth: October 5, 1949
Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities….
In 'The Plato Papers' I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there's a….
I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in m….
It's only recently that we've discovered that the artist's inner self is somehow more important than the public world. I'm happier to create exterior….
Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody..
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 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..
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….
I had to paraphrase the paraphrase..
All cities are impressive in their way, because they represent the aspiration of men to lead a common life; those people who wish to live agreeable l….
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….
As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed..
I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned..
The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation..
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….
Freud was just a novelist..
The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentatio….
To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that….
I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical..
I am in the Pitte, but I have gone so deep that I can see the brightness of the Starres at Noon..
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his….