Quotes from Peter Ackroyd

One third, or even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.

The rise of the stricter forms of Protestantism had not yet inhibited the lavish materialism that seems to characterize Elizabethan society. This might be described as the first secular age.

The duke of Norfolk remarked to his chaplain, 'You see, we have hindered priests from having wives.' 'And can your grace', the chaplain replied, 'prevent also men's wives from having priests?

One of the first Roman leaders of the north, Coelius or Coel Hen, became in English folk rhyme 'Old King Cole'.

The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

Only after the arrival of the Normans in England was there any formal separation between Church and State.

Her principal tutor, Roger Ascham, reported that at the age of sixteen 'the constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endowed with a masculine power of application.

He had created a desert, and called it peace.

In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute;

the first sea battle in English history took place off Sandwich, in Kent, when the invaders were rebuffed.

The English rose against William every year between 1067 and 1070.

The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the 'blood eagle', whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle's folded wings.

The Danish farmers were situated by fortified towns or 'burghs' manned by the Danish army, from which we derive the term for borough. These forts could be used

The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as 'Law French'. 'Master' and 'servant' come from the French. 'Crime' and 'treason' and 'felony' are French, as are 'money' and 'payment'. The

Streoneshalch was renamed as Whitby, and Northworthig became Derby.

Many of the developments that have been described as Norman in fact represented only the acceleration of English custom.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.

And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.

The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.

I have liv'd long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call'd Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.