Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by David Starkey - Page 2

Only bad teachers lecture at a tutorial.

The use of computers and other mobile devices has to be so carefully controlled. As we discovered with 'Dream School' rather awkwardly, it can become a source of total disruption that destroys the co-operative learning experience.

My father, Bob, was a sweet, gentle man who was prone to frustration. I hardly knew him as a child, but that was typical of those days. He got up early, came home late and wanted to be left alone.

Human life isn't about ideals. It's a compromise, and occasionally it's boring.

I was born in a council house, my father left school at the age of 11, had his teeth out without anaesthetic at the age of 22.

Programmes are like weeds - they spring up, grow quickly, and then should be allowed to die quickly.

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.

I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child with these dreadful calliper things, and in push-chairs and God knows what else. I had no interest in sport and no ability at it, and so on. But on the other hand, I had a very powerful imaginative life.

It's not every day that you're the subject of direct personal attack from the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition.

At the top, successful blacks, like David Lammy and Diane Abbot, have merged effortlessly into what continues to be a largely white elite: they have studied at Oxbridge and gone on to Oxbridge-style careers, such as that of an MP. But they have done so at the cost of losing much of their credibility with blacks on the street and in the ghettos.

Our education system has been taken over by bean counters and narrow-mindedness.

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England.

The notion that you have to hold something in your head seems to have been forgotten. It is an absurdity that children learn to investigate topics without having dates in their heads, or the facts.

Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.

I believe young people need rules. They will respond to discipline.

The idea that it's only the young or people who've grown up with a technology who can appreciate it. Complete nonsense!

The wives of Henry VIII are too big to be left to chick lit. Their importance is the impact they have on the broad history of the period. On the lives of every man and every woman who lived in England then, and subsequently has lived in England.

Family really meant almost nothing to me for many years but then, to my enormous surprise, when I met my partner James I found myself re-engaging and re-connecting. My mother died in 1977 but I got to know my father as an adult, and he got on well with James. A rapprochement with my whole family followed.

In the early 20th century the monarchy was held up as the archetypical virtuous British family. In the late 20th century it became the most wonderful symbol of the complete re-engineering of family structures.

This is going to sound shocking, but being born with two club feet was quite a good beginning. If you pull through that, you're very unsentimental. My earliest memories are of really agonising pain.

One of the reasons Britain escaped the poisonous nonsense of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is the sheer, absolute, middle-of-the-road, tedious banality of the House of Windsor. I don't want my politics to be passionate.

Television is a performance, but apps actually reflect thought processes.

The Windsor monarchy is held in just awe. The whole process of criticism of the personal behaviour of the monarch is put in absolute suspense until about 1977, when it begins again.

Successful immigrants assimilate or become bi-cultural.

We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous. They are very good at imagining character: that's why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources. Full stop.

What is striking is how the reputation of the monarchy has gone up and down in my lifetime.

I am passionately committed to state education.

My relationship with my mother was unhealthily close. She was very supportive but wanted to fulfil her ambitions though me and was very reluctant to let go. She also hated my homosexuality.

I could easily have spent one half of my life in a psychiatric hospital, and the other half in the Priory.

I'm a kind of double-breasted rebel in that I've always believed the important thing is that generations react against one another. For instance, there was always something oddly creative about the fact that Hanoverian sons hated their fathers so much.

The BBC is in many ways wonderful, but it is not good at recognising when a programme has come to the end of its natural life.

I've always challenged authority.

Most of Britain is a monoculture. You think London is Britain, it isn't.

Human beings enjoy the myth of romance.

The whole history of the 20th century can be written in an utterly fascinating way.

What Black Lives Matter is doing is a deliberate inversion of the proper processes of historical analysis. It is beginning with a conclusion. And it is adapting facts to that conclusion. You should begin with the facts and work forward to a conclusion.

Why would you want to drape yourself in the trappings of marriage?

I went to a progressive primary school in Kendal, followed by a boys' grammar school and then Cambridge.

Even austere, puritanical Cambridge of the Sixties was infinitely nicer and infinitely more attractive than the world I'd known before.

I hate niceness.

I think I give far more space and play to avant-garde writing than any other contemporary textbook author. I want students to be able to decide for themselves which aesthetics are closest to their own. Still, while I try not to be a nostalgist myself, I suppose I am drawn to those poignant moments in our lives, rendered clearly and artfully.

Compare the scale and magnifcence of Versailles with St James's - the brick-built hovel in which the 18th-century kings of England lived. What was then the most powerful monarchy in the world housed its sovereigns in a converted leper hospital, yet, at the same time, parliament provided the magnificent palaces of Chelsea and Greenwich as hospitals for retired soldiers and sailors.

I would put forward a modest proposition that we were very much better governed by Henry VIII than we are by King Gordon.

In the 20th century, the position of the monarch as head of the Church of England was given a meaning which it never had before. You took the fact that the monarch was head of the Church of England to mean that the British monarchy was itself a religious or moral institution and the monarchy became a symbol of national public morality.

Embrace the melancholic voice completely in the drafting stages, to explore it for all it's worth. Then, in revision, privilege craft over pure feeling. Write the work that someone besides you will want to read.

Once a piece of writing gets to a moment where it's not going to get much better than it already is, marinate it. If you still like the piece, send it out and see what others think. If not, it's time to put it away and forget about it for a while.

I do think poetry needs to invite the reader, especially when there are so many other distractions while reading.

I think it's probably true that creative people are touched by melancholy more than the average person, and to the extent that delving into that shadow world produces good work, I'm all for it. But I think you have to be able to step back from the work, and say, "Look how miserable I felt. Look how beautifully I wrote about it. Now I'm going to get an iced coffee and chat with a friend." Writing should be a way out of despair.

Out of the chaos of post-Roman Dark Age Britain, the English had created the world's first nation-state: One king, one country, one church, one currency, one language and a single unified representative national administration. Never again in England would sovereignty descend to the merely regional level. Never again would the idea of England and the unity of England ever be challenged.

I admire writers who have the tenacity to write a blog, and I'm told by everyone that it's an important element in remaining visible in the online world. That said, I'm personally turned off by writers' blogs that do nothing but sing their own accomplishments.

My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.

I think my cheerfulness keeps my writing from sinking into the depths of melancholy, while the darker side keeps in check any literary silliness I might be inclined toward.

If you really want people to pay attention to how you feel, you need to express your feelings in language that's worth reading.