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.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

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

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

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.