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.

People are much more interesting than people realise.

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

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

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.

It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one's soul so much that they adore one's body also?