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

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

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.

People are much more interesting than people realise.

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.