Quotes from David Starkey

My father, Bob, was a sweet, gentle man who was prone to frustration. I hardly knew him as a child, but that was typical of those days. He got up early, came home late and wanted to be left alone.

We have this extraordinarily unbalanced constitution, in which we have an elected dictatorship of the prime minister.

I could easily have spent one half of my life in a psychiatric hospital, and the other half in the Priory.

Human beings enjoy the myth of romance.

The mere mention of domestic service brings some people out in spots of outrage, but there is a crying need for relatively low-level employment. It's ridiculous that people at the top are killing themselves in demanding jobs and then coming home to mow their own lawns.

I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child with these dreadful calliper things, and in push-chairs and God knows what else. I had no interest in sport and no ability at it, and so on. But on the other hand, I had a very powerful imaginative life.

Unhappy marriages are big box office.

Walking is central to my relaxation because when I'm writing I'm stationary for seven hours at a time.

The idea that it's only the young or people who've grown up with a technology who can appreciate it. Complete nonsense!

We don't normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn't have the vote and weren't allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation.

Human life isn't about ideals. It's a compromise, and occasionally it's boring.

What is striking is how the reputation of the monarchy has gone up and down in my lifetime.

The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.

The food of my childhood was revolting because I was a child of rationing. However, I still managed to be a very plump child and, indeed, as a teenager, positively fat. In my early twenties I lost three stone in one summer using the only diet that works: the pure protein diet. I kept to it until I was about 50.

I've always had a naughty streak.

I organise my work in the form of a daily diary. Each chapter is strictly chronological but is also monothematic - say, a war, a set of peace negotiations, a joust.

It's not every day that you're the subject of direct personal attack from the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition.

I tend to be a bit of a proselytiser for the importance of royal courts, but all politics - in fact every form of human organisation, and this is something that's so dreadful for all those brought up in the 60s - naturally reverts to monarchy. Newspapers have editors, companies have chief executives.

Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they end up knowing more and more about less and less. It's a malaise that has now infected A-levels and GCSEs.

Elizabeth for the whole of Edward's reign, never wore the rich jewels and clothes left her by her father. Instead, she offered a more virtuous example than the writing of Saints Peter and Paul, her maidenly apparel making the ladies of the court ashamed to be dressed and painted like peacocks.

We tend to think of the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of England. But the Saxon Conquest was even more important, since it created both the reality and the idea of England itself.

Britannia became the land of the Angles or Ængla Land.

The result was that, throughout the continental provinces of the Empire, a hybrid sub-Roman society continued to propagate Roman and Christian ideas of politics under the rule of Germanic kings;

Latin – if increasingly debased and diluted – continued to be the spoken and written language, used by the invaders and the native populations alike.