Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

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.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.

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.

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

I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.