Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Lucy Worsley - Page 2

People often misuse the term 'Regency' to describe art or antiques dating from a vague period between the 1790s and the 1830s, but technically the period only lasted between 1811 and 1820.

One of the great privileges of my job as a curator is occasionally taking people up onto the roof of Hampton Court for a tour.

It's our job as curators to open up Hampton Court to visitors, and to look after the buildings and collections for the future.

To wear stays forces you into the elegant, balletic posture of a Georgian minuet-dancer. As with the tight-lacing, there is still great debate about whether stay-wearing, which began in adolescence, actually changed the shape of the skeleton, or was just a cosmetic, temporary, alteration.

Torture and cruelty are the words that come to mind when people think of the Tower. Here it was that the princes were murdered, Guy Fawkes racked and Henry VIII's queens executed.

Today's builders and town planners believe people inhabit 'places'. Yet medieval towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities in which people ate local, seasonal food, and rich and poor lived in close proximity.

If you work as a curator, as I do, at Hampton Court, you sometimes wonder if there might be more to life than Henry VIII.

Endless Jane Austen film adaptations have given us the idea that the Regency was a classy, pretty, palatable period of history. Notable for their muslins, tea parties and flirting, you'd think that most Regency folk lived in highly desirable rectories.

Medieval kings left the job of kindness to their queens. If the queen begged for someone not to be beheaded, the king could show mercy without losing face.

Dorothy L. Sayers is absolutely my favorite The reason she stands above Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham is because she was so subtly aware of the lot and trials of women of her decade.

Regency buildings are often said to lack the serenity of their early Georgian predecessors, or the intense scholarship of the subsequent Gothic revival.

In the past, people didn't necessarily want their king to be kind. If a foreign power was threatening the country, they wanted him to fight.

Once you become a curator, you will inevitably end up on TV, if only to talk about your latest exhibition.

As a curator, I've met endless people who feel a 'special connection' with Anne Boleyn, or Victorian prostitutes, or various other unlikely candidates.

Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it.

If you lived in 18th-century England, you probably lived in a village, worked on the land, and your greatest fears were probably dying in a famine or of disease or in a war.

The grand sweep of constitutional or political history is important, but a detailed history of daily life also gives you a wonderful insight into the strange mental worlds of people in the past.

I was a bit disappointed to discover that the French Riviera seems to have a large motorway running along the edge of it.

I once rented the Georgian town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum - so I lived in Jane Austen's house, and slept in Jane Austen's bedroom. You can walk along these Georgian streets and it's like you're in a Jane Austen period drama.

History was the subject that didn't seem like work. It was enjoyable. That's why I was drawn to doing it really.

There seems to me to be something admirable, indeed noble, about the people arguing over Richard III. They're doers rather than naysayers, romantics rather than realists, people looking for meaning rather than numbness.

Britain can claim to lead the world in murder because it was a country that industrialized early. Other countries, going through the same process later, caught up and produced their own genres of detective fiction.

Jane, Henry VIII's third wife, wasn't present at her son's christening, as ritual dictated she had to spend another month in bed. From her chamber she could have looked down on the christening procession below, and must have felt great pride.

Two hundred years ago, bathrooms didn't exist. The bathroom's development has not been a straightforward matter, and you might be surprised to learn that many Tudor people had worse personal hygiene than their medieval ancestors.

Many British people have a snap of their younger self, posing next to a Yeoman Warder or Beefeater at the Tower of London. I'm no exception, and my youthful visit created such an impression that in later life I set out to become one of the curators of the Tower.

Medieval and Tudor people didn't treat buildings as a semi-disposable resource like we do.

Sales of corsets doubled between 1948 and 1958, possibly as part of the process of putting women back into the box, as they gave up the jobs and freedoms that came during wartime.

Because of the demands of court politics and the public position in which they lived, George I, George II and their children ended up doing bizarre and horrible things to each other, such as kidnapping a baby.

I love visiting Landmark Trust properties, which tend to be historical follies in extraordinary places.

Staymakers and fashion designers have always wanted us to purchase new clothes, so they change their output year on year - we feel out of date, and feel that itch to buy.

Medieval people didn't have special rooms for sleeping, just a single living space for everything. They put up with this lack of privacy partly for the lack of other options.

Windows will grow smaller again and houses will contain much less glass - not only because of the high energy costs of glass but because it's thermally inefficient.

A Georgian man's shirt had a long tail, which he tucked between his legs rather like a nappy. Over it went his 'breech liners', the long, linen forerunners of drawers. All of this was intended to keep his unwashable outer clothes free from the sweat and stink of his skin.

Being a historian, if only for the day, teaches you useful things like judgment, and the ability to detect when someone is lying to you.

The word crap is actually another word that's very, very old. It was taken over from 17th century England by the pilgrim fathers and Americans were talking about things being crap in the 17th and 18th centuries. What Sir Thomas Crapper – complete coincidence – does is not invent the flushing toilet, as many, many people believe, but was a great promoter for it. He ran a business marketing other people's products and that's why his name was on them. When the American soldiers came over in the First World War, they all thought it was hilarious that it said 'crapper' on them.