Occupation: Biographer Birth: October 5, 1949
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….
Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?.
I don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not..
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh..
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….
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….
The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me..
One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines..
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books..
When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled tha….
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 think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive..
There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it's like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I've finished writing about them, I completely fo….
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….