Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by David Starkey
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English historian David Starkey.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
I spent a lot of my infancy in hospital and actually started school in a wheelchair with this enormous plaster, and then into a surgical boot and callipers, none of which helps assimilation with other children.
If you make a book which is little more than putting a television script on the page, and add a few pictures, that would be a bad thing. But I would never do that because I happen to be very interested in language, in writing.
Not to invent yourself is to be false. To follow preordained rules is a profound betrayal of what it means to be human.
I remain a very reluctant member of the Conservative Party. On the principle that one sort of ought to. Unfortunately, in 21st-century Britain I have no political home whatever. I get very sickened at the conventional right-wing label.
The mere mention of domestic service brings some people out in spots of outrage, but there is a crying need for relatively low-level employment. It's ridiculous that people at the top are killing themselves in demanding jobs and then coming home to mow their own lawns.
The food of my childhood was revolting because I was a child of rationing. However, I still managed to be a very plump child and, indeed, as a teenager, positively fat. In my early twenties I lost three stone in one summer using the only diet that works: the pure protein diet. I kept to it until I was about 50.
If you look at comparative figures, the last two episodes of 'Six Wives of Henry VIII' were watched by 4m. Graham Norton, who is very funny, gets 3m. Johnny Vaughan's comedy, which I have never seen but people say isn't very good, got less than half the viewers of 'Six Wives.'
I've studied kings, so I'm very aware of the feet of clay of authority.
My mother scrubbed other people's floors for a living, and I remember vividly her worrying about being down to the last half crown for the week. And I was aware of it, and absolutely determined that under no circumstances would that ever happen to me.
I mean, really, compared to a senior civil servant, I'm very modestly paid!
I've always been very good at obliterating the undesirable.
We have this extraordinarily unbalanced constitution, in which we have an elected dictatorship of the prime minister.
If I'm relaxing, I'll make a proper cooked breakfast and very slowly drift into the day.
My father was a trained engineer who got his qualifications at night school.
What I love doing is creating a room, with attractive paintings and colours and furnishings - very much my mother.
If all the people of this country, black and white alike, are to enter fully into our national story, as I desperately hope they will, they must do so on terms of reciprocity.
In the same way that I've no desire to live in earlier historical periods, I never touch historical recipes. Most historical cooking is detestable.
I'm not a completely envy-free zone - I envy 25-year-old men with magnificent bodies - but when I look at my colleagues on the whole, I don't think I have much to envy!
I've written on Apple Macs since the early 80s - they're lovely to use and beautiful to look at.
We don't normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn't have the vote and weren't allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation.
The reign of Henry VIII is the axis around which England turns.
We have a lot to learn from the Tudor education system. It had diversity, placed rigorous demands on its students, and encouraged high achievement.
We are dangerously devaluing knowledge and learning by no longer having a requirement to remember anything at all.
Freedom of speech wasn't won by being nice, it has been won by struggle with religion.
When you look at the history of the monarchy, there's one period that stands out where it is held in universally, awe-inspired reverence and esteem. It's not Henry VIII, its certainly not Victoria; it's the first 70 years of the 20th century.
It's one of the great mysteries to me how anybody who has ever believed in socialism can conceivably vote for Blair or New Labour, which is further to the right of any Tory government apart from that of John Major, and is taking privatisation into realms unheard-of.
I always bought pictures, I only started to buy oil paintings when I started to make serious amounts of money because they cost a serious amount of money.
The notion of public service has effectively been abandoned. Every political party now buys into business values, and into the notion that by definition business must run things more efficiently.
I was outrageous on the 'Moral Maze.' The closest I sailed to the wind was when I almost outed a most saintly Cardinal in a talk on homosexuality in public life.
I organise my work in the form of a daily diary. Each chapter is strictly chronological but is also monothematic - say, a war, a set of peace negotiations, a joust.
You could say that my life since has been a sustained act of luxurious rebellion.
High malice is almost inherent in the profession of historian.
I enjoy cooking, but stick to modern dishes.
The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.
To footnote properly takes time.
Academics aren't paid very much, but as a single gay man I was never badly off. You don't have kids. You don't have a non-working wife's insatiable demand for shoes or wallpaper.
Above all, it was the style of Quakerism I was brought up with - an aggressive contempt for popular opinion. The assumption is that most people think something that is wrong, which is great.
Since I was a child, I've gone to bed when things get too much. As a result, I have more trouble winding up than winding down in the morning. I need a second cup of coffee and then I potter around in a disgusting white towelling dressing gown for as long as possible.
Churchill may have made some horrendous mistakes - Gallipoli, for one - but he had a sense of the profundity and integrity of the English experience. By contrast, Blair believes he excised the past in 1997, though what no one on the left seems to have realised is that his historic mission was to destroy the Labour party, not the Tories.
Walking is central to my relaxation because when I'm writing I'm stationary for seven hours at a time.
My mother had been an incredibly bright kid but her family couldn't afford for her to stay in education. So she lived through me. She was a very remarkable woman and I owe a huge debt to her. She was unashamed about delighting in the fact that I was intelligent, and she drove and pushed me. She was also completely indifferent to popularity.
Unhappy marriages are big box office.
I started school in the autumn term of 1949 when there was a tomato glut. We had tomatoes in every form known to God, man or beast - and they were all equally detestable. When you pushed them with your fork, a warmish liquid spurted forth. It was rather like sort of bursting a boil.
I was a complete and typical only child. I was bookish, and sport was out of the question anyway. I had read all of Dickens and most of the volumes of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia by the time I was 11. The only time I was popular at school was the day I won the debating competition for my house.
I was born a cripple, with two club feet, and mild polio in the left leg. I was in orthopaedic boots right through to my teenage years and, unfortunately, the fashion then was for light shoes. I discovered very quickly that I had a sharp mind and an exceedingly sharp tongue.
Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they end up knowing more and more about less and less. It's a malaise that has now infected A-levels and GCSEs.
I tend to be a bit of a proselytiser for the importance of royal courts, but all politics - in fact every form of human organisation, and this is something that's so dreadful for all those brought up in the 60s - naturally reverts to monarchy. Newspapers have editors, companies have chief executives.
I never snack apart from fruit such as Cox's apples.
I'm not a delicate man.
My parents were Quaker, and they were part of that old self-improving working class.
In the early 60s, you read your essays to your supervisor rather than hand them in. I was both lazy and clever, and realised I didn't need to write essays at all, I could simply talk with some notes in front of me.
Delving into history is not an escape for me. I'm like a detective, sniffing for clues with a terrier-like excitement.
It's very easy to front 'The Weakest Link;' it takes 10 minutes to prepare. But it takes three months to prepare an hour-long history programme.
Writing is a real activity conducted in real time.
The Tudors' is terrible history with no point. It's wrong for no purpose.
I've always had a naughty streak.
Floating the idea that every kid in Brixton can become a whizkid at information technology is dishonest.
I've got no problem with getting history wrong for a purpose - Shakespeare often got things wrong for a reason. But it's the randomised arrogance of ignorance of 'The Tudors.' Shame on the BBC for producing it.
We should recognise that only around a third of the population can be in internationally competitive jobs. So we need to develop a middle-band craft economy like the one the French have so cleverly maintained.
The notion that you can duff up a country for three months, pacify it for a bit longer and then miraculously transform it into a liberal democracy is just ludicrous. You might achieve some kind of democracy: it's the liberal bit I take issue with.
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