Quotes from Lucy Worsley

Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors.

The grand sweep of constitutional or political history is important, but a detailed history of daily life also gives you a wonderful insight into the strange mental worlds of people in the past.

There's a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.

Torture and cruelty are the words that come to mind when people think of the Tower. Here it was that the princes were murdered, Guy Fawkes racked and Henry VIII's queens executed.

Today's builders and town planners believe people inhabit 'places'. Yet medieval towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities in which people ate local, seasonal food, and rich and poor lived in close proximity.

Once you become a curator, you will inevitably end up on TV, if only to talk about your latest exhibition.

My first time skiing was in Vail, Colorado. It was brilliant fun until I whacked myself in the face with my ski pole.

Yes, if you lace your corset up as snugly as is humanly possible, it will undoubtedly impede your breathing and make you more likely to faint. But it's not certain that Victorian women really did that on a regular basis.

Dorothy L. Sayers is absolutely my favorite The reason she stands above Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham is because she was so subtly aware of the lot and trials of women of her decade.

Medieval people didn't have special rooms for sleeping, just a single living space for everything. They put up with this lack of privacy partly for the lack of other options.

I have many pairs of long gloves because my wrists get cold as I also like coats with short sleeves - what Jackie O would have called bracelet-length sleeves.

I once rented the Georgian town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum - so I lived in Jane Austen's house, and slept in Jane Austen's bedroom. You can walk along these Georgian streets and it's like you're in a Jane Austen period drama.

One thing that does seem to particularly annoy people is my voice and my very slight, to me unnoticeable, speech impediment.

I want to look like I'm friendly, approachable and jolly.

Because of the demands of court politics and the public position in which they lived, George I, George II and their children ended up doing bizarre and horrible things to each other, such as kidnapping a baby.

What truly gives me joy is when I get a letter from a young woman who says they saw a programme, then read a book, then went to an evening class, and then studied a history degree at the Open University - and now I want your job.

I'm very interested in Queen Victoria's younger years at Kensington Palace. She was born in the dining room because it had stairs down to hot water in the kitchen.

Many British people have a snap of their younger self, posing next to a Yeoman Warder or Beefeater at the Tower of London. I'm no exception, and my youthful visit created such an impression that in later life I set out to become one of the curators of the Tower.

In big museums, the role of the curator has shrunk in recent years as different branches of curatorial work - such as interpretation, or learning, or conservation - have split off and become professions of their own.

Working in a museum has given me a connection to people - to the rest of humanity - that I never had before.

When I was little, all I really wanted out of my life was to become Nancy Drew. I've always enjoyed fictional sleuths, especially Nancy.

One thing I know, and any female presenters will know this, is don't reveal any body part or bend over because freaks will freeze-frame it and put it on their nasty messageboards.

Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it.

Only in the nineteenth century, with the improvements to the water supply forced by the fear of cholera, and with the building of underground sewers, did the flushing toilet finally take its place in most homes.