Quotes from Peter Ackroyd

The less you see, the more you can imagine.

It is the nature of humankind to idealize, to indulge in excessive praise as well as unjust condemnation.

The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.

what think you of that, Nick, since you allwaies have your Head stuck in old Books? And I said nothing, for who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

it has been observed that Londoners became more extravagant in the presence of Charles Dickens, so that they might appear more Dickensian, so

1540 and 1547 prices rose by 46 per cent; in 1549 they had risen by another 11 per cent.

In 1076 he decreed that none of the English clergy would be allowed to marry.

It is one of the attributes of capitalist enterprise that an object is no longer significant for its essence but for its exchange value.

The Orkney islands and the Shetlands were in fact not surrendered to Scotland until the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Norwegian was still being spoken in the Shetlands at the end of the eighteenth century; the island accent is still much closer to Norwegian than to Scots or English.

Here is another vignette of medieval England. John and Agnes Page, from a village in Kent, took John Pistor to the manor court. Agnes Page had purchased John Pistor's wife in exchange for a pig worth 3 shillings; John Pistor was happy with the arrangement for a while, but eventually he asked that his wife be returned to him on payment of 2 shillings. The bargain was agreed, but Pistor did not pay the sum. The jury found against him.

Slavery was in fact a legal punishment inflicted on those, for example, who could not pay their fines.

the writing of history is often another way of defining chaos. There is in fact a case for saying that human history, as it is generally described and understood, is the sum total of accident and unintended consequence.

Slaves, like oxen and sheep, were known as 'live money'.

The love that dares not speak its name has never stopped talking.

our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors'.

was ruled on behalf of the king by a shire-reeve whose name became sheriff.

History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity.

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress of evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the 'development' of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition.

the king was still vengeful. 'Tell the archbishop,' he said, 'that I hated him yesterday and that I hate him even more today. Tell him that I will hate him more and more tomorrow and every day.

The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety;

purlieus of London

At the beginning of the twelfth century, the rabbit was introduced to England.

The parish priests themselves were often illiterate, and many complaints were made about their drunkenness and violence.