Top 60 David Starkey Quotes

The notion of public service has effectively been abandoned. Every political party now buys into business values, and into the notion that by definition business must run things more efficiently.

I spent a lot of my infancy in hospital and actually started school in a wheelchair with this enormous plaster, and then into a surgical boot and callipers, none of which helps assimilation with other children.

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England.

I always bought pictures, I only started to buy oil paintings when I started to make serious amounts of money because they cost a serious amount of money.

One of the reasons Britain escaped the poisonous nonsense of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia is the sheer, absolute, middle-of-the-road, tedious banality of the House of Windsor. I don’t want my politics to be passionate.

Human beings enjoy the myth of romance.

Since I was a child, I’ve gone to bed when things get too much. As a result, I have more trouble winding up than winding down in the morning. I need a second cup of coffee and then I potter around in a disgusting white towelling dressing gown for as long as possible.

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

Why would you want to drape yourself in the trappings of marriage?

The Tudors’ is terrible history with no point. It’s wrong for no purpose.

The notion that you can duff up a country for three months, pacify it for a bit longer and then miraculously transform it into a liberal democracy is just ludicrous. You might achieve some kind of democracy: it’s the liberal bit I take issue with.

In the early 20th century the monarchy was held up as the archetypical virtuous British family. In the late 20th century it became the most wonderful symbol of the complete re-engineering of family structures.

I’ve always been very good at obliterating the undesirable.

The notion that you have to hold something in your head seems to have been forgotten. It is an absurdity that children learn to investigate topics without having dates in their heads, or the facts.

Writing is a real activity conducted in real time.

I’ve studied kings, so I’m very aware of the feet of clay of authority.

I’ve got no problem with getting history wrong for a purpose – Shakespeare often got things wrong for a reason. But it’s the randomised arrogance of ignorance of ‘The Tudors.’ Shame on the BBC for producing it.

The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.

Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white.

I’m not a delicate man.

I was born in a council house, my father left school at the age of 11, had his teeth out without anaesthetic at the age of 22.

This is going to sound shocking, but being born with two club feet was quite a good beginning. If you pull through that, you’re very unsentimental. My earliest memories are of really agonising pain.

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.

I’m not a completely envy-free zone – I envy 25-year-old men with magnificent bodies – but when I look at my colleagues on the whole, I don’t think I have much to envy!

High malice is almost inherent in the profession of historian.

My mother scrubbed other people’s floors for a living, and I remember vividly her worrying about being down to the last half crown for the week. And I was aware of it, and absolutely determined that under no circumstances would that ever happen to me.

Floating the idea that every kid in Brixton can become a whizkid at information technology is dishonest.

The food of my childhood was revolting because I was a child of rationing. However, I still managed to be a very plump child and, indeed, as a teenager, positively fat. In my early twenties I lost three stone in one summer using the only diet that works: the pure protein diet. I kept to it until I was about 50.

I’ve always challenged authority.

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

Only bad teachers lecture at a tutorial.

Walking is central to my relaxation because when I’m writing I’m stationary for seven hours at a time.

The use of computers and other mobile devices has to be so carefully controlled. As we discovered with ‘Dream School’ rather awkwardly, it can become a source of total disruption that destroys the co-operative learning experience.

My relationship with my mother was unhealthily close. She was very supportive but wanted to fulfil her ambitions though me and was very reluctant to let go. She also hated my homosexuality.

The wives of Henry VIII are too big to be left to chick lit. Their importance is the impact they have on the broad history of the period. On the lives of every man and every woman who lived in England then, and subsequently has lived in England.

My parents were Quaker, and they were part of that old self-improving working class.

You could say that my life since has been a sustained act of luxurious rebellion.

My father was a trained engineer who got his qualifications at night school.

We are dangerously devaluing knowledge and learning by no longer having a requirement to remember anything at all.

Our education system has been taken over by bean counters and narrow-mindedness.

Television is a performance, but apps actually reflect thought processes.

I was outrageous on the ‘Moral Maze.’ The closest I sailed to the wind was when I almost outed a most saintly Cardinal in a talk on homosexuality in public life.

I never snack apart from fruit such as Cox’s apples.

The reign of Henry VIII is the axis around which England turns.

We have a lot to learn from the Tudor education system. It had diversity, placed rigorous demands on its students, and encouraged high achievement.

We should recognise that only around a third of the population can be in internationally competitive jobs. So we need to develop a middle-band craft economy like the one the French have so cleverly maintained.

If you look at comparative figures, the last two episodes of ‘Six Wives of Henry VIII’ were watched by 4m. Graham Norton, who is very funny, gets 3m. Johnny Vaughan’s comedy, which I have never seen but people say isn’t very good, got less than half the viewers of ‘Six Wives.’

I enjoy cooking, but stick to modern dishes.

If I’m relaxing, I’ll make a proper cooked breakfast and very slowly drift into the day.

The BBC is in many ways wonderful, but it is not good at recognising when a programme has come to the end of its natural life.

I started school in the autumn term of 1949 when there was a tomato glut. We had tomatoes in every form known to God, man or beast – and they were all equally detestable. When you pushed them with your fork, a warmish liquid spurted forth. It was rather like sort of bursting a boil.

I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child with these dreadful calliper things, and in push-chairs and God knows what else. I had no interest in sport and no ability at it, and so on. But on the other hand, I had a very powerful imaginative life.

I went to a progressive primary school in Kendal, followed by a boys’ grammar school and then Cambridge.

Above all, it was the style of Quakerism I was brought up with – an aggressive contempt for popular opinion. The assumption is that most people think something that is wrong, which is great.

In the same way that I’ve no desire to live in earlier historical periods, I never touch historical recipes. Most historical cooking is detestable.

If you make a book which is little more than putting a television script on the page, and add a few pictures, that would be a bad thing. But I would never do that because I happen to be very interested in language, in writing.

It’s one of the great mysteries to me how anybody who has ever believed in socialism can conceivably vote for Blair or New Labour, which is further to the right of any Tory government apart from that of John Major, and is taking privatisation into realms unheard-of.

I remain a very reluctant member of the Conservative Party. On the principle that one sort of ought to. Unfortunately, in 21st-century Britain I have no political home whatever. I get very sickened at the conventional right-wing label.

We don’t normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn’t have the vote and weren’t allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation.

I organise my work in the form of a daily diary. Each chapter is strictly chronological but is also monothematic – say, a war, a set of peace negotiations, a joust.