Quotes from David Starkey

My mother scrubbed other people's floors for a living, and I remember vividly her worrying about being down to the last half crown for the week. And I was aware of it, and absolutely determined that under no circumstances would that ever happen to me.

I started school in the autumn term of 1949 when there was a tomato glut. We had tomatoes in every form known to God, man or beast - and they were all equally detestable. When you pushed them with your fork, a warmish liquid spurted forth. It was rather like sort of bursting a boil.

I was born a cripple, with two club feet, and mild polio in the left leg. I was in orthopaedic boots right through to my teenage years and, unfortunately, the fashion then was for light shoes. I discovered very quickly that I had a sharp mind and an exceedingly sharp tongue.

The notion that you have to hold something in your head seems to have been forgotten. It is an absurdity that children learn to investigate topics without having dates in their heads, or the facts.

Churchill may have made some horrendous mistakes - Gallipoli, for one - but he had a sense of the profundity and integrity of the English experience. By contrast, Blair believes he excised the past in 1997, though what no one on the left seems to have realised is that his historic mission was to destroy the Labour party, not the Tories.

It's one of the great mysteries to me how anybody who has ever believed in socialism can conceivably vote for Blair or New Labour, which is further to the right of any Tory government apart from that of John Major, and is taking privatisation into realms unheard-of.

The use of computers and other mobile devices has to be so carefully controlled. As we discovered with 'Dream School' rather awkwardly, it can become a source of total disruption that destroys the co-operative learning experience.

I remain a very reluctant member of the Conservative Party. On the principle that one sort of ought to. Unfortunately, in 21st-century Britain I have no political home whatever. I get very sickened at the conventional right-wing label.

My mother had been an incredibly bright kid but her family couldn't afford for her to stay in education. So she lived through me. She was a very remarkable woman and I owe a huge debt to her. She was unashamed about delighting in the fact that I was intelligent, and she drove and pushed me. She was also completely indifferent to popularity.

Successful immigrants assimilate or become bi-cultural.

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.

We are dangerously devaluing knowledge and learning by no longer having a requirement to remember anything at all.

Floating the idea that every kid in Brixton can become a whizkid at information technology is dishonest.

High malice is almost inherent in the profession of historian.

The Tudors' is terrible history with no point. It's wrong for no purpose.

My father was a trained engineer who got his qualifications at night school.

The notion that you can duff up a country for three months, pacify it for a bit longer and then miraculously transform it into a liberal democracy is just ludicrous. You might achieve some kind of democracy: it's the liberal bit I take issue with.

Even austere, puritanical Cambridge of the Sixties was infinitely nicer and infinitely more attractive than the world I'd known before.

If I'm relaxing, I'll make a proper cooked breakfast and very slowly drift into the day.

I never snack apart from fruit such as Cox's apples.

I've studied kings, so I'm very aware of the feet of clay of authority.

I'm not a completely envy-free zone - I envy 25-year-old men with magnificent bodies - but when I look at my colleagues on the whole, I don't think I have much to envy!

This is going to sound shocking, but being born with two club feet was quite a good beginning. If you pull through that, you're very unsentimental. My earliest memories are of really agonising pain.

We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous. They are very good at imagining character: that's why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources. Full stop.