Quotes About History

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive.

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

The 1950s is a key decade in the 20th Century. Each year has a distinctive flavour.

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.

Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?' In the old days she'd have been 'miss' and he'd have offered her a cocktail.

History makes my mouth water - and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.

The question shouldn't be, 'Are we guilty about our Colonial past?' it should be, 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present?

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

I've always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.

They march into the future to the rhythm of the past.

Didn't young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

There were so many wrongs piling up on both sides, so much of the past being dragged into the present, that living there was like carving the story of your life on to a sepulchral monument.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.

An important part of deciding where we want to go, as a society and culture, is knowing where we have come from, and indeed, how far we have come.

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

It's entirely possible to base an entire book on a long-forgotten letter.