Quotes from Lucy Worsley

I've always being interested in clothes - and I'm also the curator of a significant dress collection with 12,000 objects in it - the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace.

I am a museum curator when I am not on the television and in our collection at Kensington Palace we have a book like Marie Antoinette's, which belonged to the daughters of George III.

I'd prefer to cook for friends at home than go to a restaurant. My mum is a feeder and I get it from her - I know when I visit her there will be three different types of home-made cake waiting for me.

I love visiting Landmark Trust properties, which tend to be historical follies in extraordinary places.

It's our job as curators to open up Hampton Court to visitors, and to look after the buildings and collections for the future.

When it comes to history I am shameless. I will do whatever it takes to get people involved.

Medieval and Tudor people didn't treat buildings as a semi-disposable resource like we do.

I see bundling as a really important step in the journey toward marriage becoming a marriage of personal choice, rather than something you're just forced into by your parents for economic reasons, because you don't have to marry the man or woman after the night of bundling.

Sales of corsets doubled between 1948 and 1958, possibly as part of the process of putting women back into the box, as they gave up the jobs and freedoms that came during wartime.

My parents weren't keen on me watching television when I was growing up, in the 70s and 80s, which is ironic given that I've ended up working in it.

Everything is different about the world of the past, including the way we think and move, and you get a sense of that through the clothing.

My dad wanted me to be a scientist and I was set to study science A-levels. But after the first term I realised it would be much more enjoyable to study English and history, which didn't seem like work - so I switched.

You would think that the weapons of a king and queen were perhaps their armies or centuries of tradition but what they have is the power of the media. The visual is almost more important than words because they don't have that many opportunities to speak.

I am quite old-fashioned: I wouldn't consciously think 'I am going to dress up in a sexy manner' because it's just not me. I like to look cheeky, friendly and approachable, and I wear bright colours, like a clown.

I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing. The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.

I don't want to be definitive or the last word on anything.

Endless Jane Austen film adaptations have given us the idea that the Regency was a classy, pretty, palatable period of history. Notable for their muslins, tea parties and flirting, you'd think that most Regency folk lived in highly desirable rectories.

A lot of people would say history is important because it helps us to predict the future. I don't think that it does particularly. What it really teaches you is that things have not always been the same, and they don't have to be the way they are.

I like all the types of supposed work that I do. It's a privilege: I can't believe I get paid for it.

One of the great privileges of my job as a curator is occasionally taking people up onto the roof of Hampton Court for a tour.

Jane, Henry VIII's third wife, wasn't present at her son's christening, as ritual dictated she had to spend another month in bed. From her chamber she could have looked down on the christening procession below, and must have felt great pride.

Britain can claim to lead the world in murder because it was a country that industrialized early. Other countries, going through the same process later, caught up and produced their own genres of detective fiction.

I was a bit disappointed to discover that the French Riviera seems to have a large motorway running along the edge of it.

I don't see any distinction between work and pleasure so I do spend a lot of what other people might consider my leisure time doing history things.