I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.

The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

Love of learning will never let you down. You can have a quest for money, you can have a quest for power, you can have a quest for fame and they are sometimes gratifying and sometimes self-destructive. The love of learning is always gratifying and never self-destructive. The more educated, the more cultivated a society becomes, better off is everybody.

I love all sides of the work but that doesn't mean it isn't hard.

I think that a good education ought to be in part the idea that ease and joy are not synonymous. Some of the most fulfilling pleasures of life are to be found in work - found in work you love to do, work you want to do, work that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?