The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

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.

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

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.

I saw a ghost once, about 20 years ago. It took the form of someone coming out of a sleeping body and sitting at the foot of the bed.

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 don't in any sense think of myself as a celebrity, which of course I'm not.