I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.

Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.