I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.