Quotes from David Starkey

Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they end up knowing more and more about less and less. It's a malaise that has now infected A-levels and GCSEs.

In the early 60s, you read your essays to your supervisor rather than hand them in. I was both lazy and clever, and realised I didn't need to write essays at all, I could simply talk with some notes in front of me.

Family really meant almost nothing to me for many years but then, to my enormous surprise, when I met my partner James I found myself re-engaging and re-connecting. My mother died in 1977 but I got to know my father as an adult, and he got on well with James. A rapprochement with my whole family followed.

We tend to think of the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of England. But the Saxon Conquest was even more important, since it created both the reality and the idea of England itself.

The mere mention of domestic service brings some people out in spots of outrage, but there is a crying need for relatively low-level employment. It's ridiculous that people at the top are killing themselves in demanding jobs and then coming home to mow their own lawns.

Britannia became the land of the Angles or Ængla Land.

I believe young people need rules. They will respond to discipline.

Elizabeth for the whole of Edward's reign, never wore the rich jewels and clothes left her by her father. Instead, she offered a more virtuous example than the writing of Saints Peter and Paul, her maidenly apparel making the ladies of the court ashamed to be dressed and painted like peacocks.

I tend to be a bit of a proselytiser for the importance of royal courts, but all politics - in fact every form of human organisation, and this is something that's so dreadful for all those brought up in the 60s - naturally reverts to monarchy. Newspapers have editors, companies have chief executives.

What is striking is how the reputation of the monarchy has gone up and down in my lifetime.

Human beings enjoy the myth of romance.

High malice is almost inherent in the profession of historian.