Quotes from David Starkey

I believe young people need rules. They will respond to discipline.

What I love doing is creating a room, with attractive paintings and colours and furnishings - very much my mother.

I always bought pictures, I only started to buy oil paintings when I started to make serious amounts of money because they cost a serious amount of money.

I was a complete and typical only child. I was bookish, and sport was out of the question anyway. I had read all of Dickens and most of the volumes of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia by the time I was 11. The only time I was popular at school was the day I won the debating competition for my house.

If you make a book which is little more than putting a television script on the page, and add a few pictures, that would be a bad thing. But I would never do that because I happen to be very interested in language, in writing.

I am passionately committed to state education.

I've always challenged authority.

In the early 60s, you read your essays to your supervisor rather than hand them in. I was both lazy and clever, and realised I didn't need to write essays at all, I could simply talk with some notes in front of me.

My relationship with my mother was unhealthily close. She was very supportive but wanted to fulfil her ambitions though me and was very reluctant to let go. She also hated my homosexuality.

Family really meant almost nothing to me for many years but then, to my enormous surprise, when I met my partner James I found myself re-engaging and re-connecting. My mother died in 1977 but I got to know my father as an adult, and he got on well with James. A rapprochement with my whole family followed.

I mean, really, compared to a senior civil servant, I'm very modestly paid!

You could say that my life since has been a sustained act of luxurious rebellion.

We have a lot to learn from the Tudor education system. It had diversity, placed rigorous demands on its students, and encouraged high achievement.

It's very easy to front 'The Weakest Link;' it takes 10 minutes to prepare. But it takes three months to prepare an hour-long history programme.

Programmes are like weeds - they spring up, grow quickly, and then should be allowed to die quickly.

Above all, it was the style of Quakerism I was brought up with - an aggressive contempt for popular opinion. The assumption is that most people think something that is wrong, which is great.

Our education system has been taken over by bean counters and narrow-mindedness.

I'm not a delicate man.

If all the people of this country, black and white alike, are to enter fully into our national story, as I desperately hope they will, they must do so on terms of reciprocity.

Delving into history is not an escape for me. I'm like a detective, sniffing for clues with a terrier-like excitement.

At the top, successful blacks, like David Lammy and Diane Abbot, have merged effortlessly into what continues to be a largely white elite: they have studied at Oxbridge and gone on to Oxbridge-style careers, such as that of an MP. But they have done so at the cost of losing much of their credibility with blacks on the street and in the ghettos.

Only bad teachers lecture at a tutorial.

I spent a lot of my infancy in hospital and actually started school in a wheelchair with this enormous plaster, and then into a surgical boot and callipers, none of which helps assimilation with other children.

What Black Lives Matter is doing is a deliberate inversion of the proper processes of historical analysis. It is beginning with a conclusion. And it is adapting facts to that conclusion. You should begin with the facts and work forward to a conclusion.