I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

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

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.

A triptych in which the presiding deities are Mother, England and Me.