Occupation: Biographer Birth: October 5, 1949
The best years are when you know what you're doing..
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….
It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?.
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….
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….
There are certain people who seem doomed to buy certain houses. The house expects them. It waits for them..
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..
Sometimes the silences, the gaps, tell us more than anything else..
Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade..
I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small..
Murderers will try to recall the sequence of events, they will remember exactly what they did just before and just after. But they can never remember….
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 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..
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….
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….
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….
A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me..
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed..
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death..
I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spirit….
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….