The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.

The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.