Top 60 Lucy Worsley Quotes

There’s a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.

When I was little, all I really wanted out of my life was to become Nancy Drew. I’ve always enjoyed fictional sleuths, especially Nancy.

I am interested in constitutional history, political history, the history of foreign affairs, but I think you can get at those subjects through the details of daily life.

The invention of the camera enabled the reinvention of the British monarchy for the modern era.

My first time skiing was in Vail, Colorado. It was brilliant fun until I whacked myself in the face with my ski pole.

Everything is different about the world of the past, including the way we think and move, and you get a sense of that through the clothing.

Staymakers and fashion designers have always wanted us to purchase new clothes, so they change their output year on year – we feel out of date, and feel that itch to buy.

My dad wanted me to be a scientist and I was set to study science A-levels. But after the first term I realised it would be much more enjoyable to study English and history, which didn’t seem like work – so I switched.

From creating a new sovereign to affairs of the heart, majestic moments to everyday life, when monarchy wants to send a message it uses a photograph.

I have a cup of tea in my hand at all times. I have about 10 a day. I don’t go for this hipster coffee nonsense. No flat whites for me!

One of the great privileges of my job as a curator is occasionally taking people up onto the roof of Hampton Court for a tour.

In the past, people didn’t necessarily want their king to be kind. If a foreign power was threatening the country, they wanted him to fight.

But the BBC has made a big push to get women historians such as Amanda Vickery, Mary Beard and Bettany Hughes on TV and they have to be given credit for that. I am lucky to be a part of that.

A lot of people would say history is important because it helps us to predict the future. I don’t think that it does particularly. What it really teaches you is that things have not always been the same, and they don’t have to be the way they are.

To wear stays forces you into the elegant, balletic posture of a Georgian minuet-dancer. As with the tight-lacing, there is still great debate about whether stay-wearing, which began in adolescence, actually changed the shape of the skeleton, or was just a cosmetic, temporary, alteration.

I’d like to meet Mrs Cornwallis, who made Henry VIII’s black puddings.

I was a bit disappointed to discover that the French Riviera seems to have a large motorway running along the edge of it.

People often misuse the term ‘Regency’ to describe art or antiques dating from a vague period between the 1790s and the 1830s, but technically the period only lasted between 1811 and 1820.

If you lived in 18th-century England, you probably lived in a village, worked on the land, and your greatest fears were probably dying in a famine or of disease or in a war.

Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it.

Torture and cruelty are the words that come to mind when people think of the Tower. Here it was that the princes were murdered, Guy Fawkes racked and Henry VIII’s queens executed.

My own office life at Hampton Court is somewhat challenging food-wise. It’s miles from anywhere, off the Chapel Court, deep inside the palace, up a spiral staircase of 51 steps. You can’t just nip out for a sandwich.

I am a museum curator when I am not on the television and in our collection at Kensington Palace we have a book like Marie Antoinette’s, which belonged to the daughters of George III.

Britain can claim to lead the world in murder because it was a country that industrialized early. Other countries, going through the same process later, caught up and produced their own genres of detective fiction.

I’ve most liked dressing up as a flapper. I’ve been flappered twice. But I care not only about the clothes they wore but what they stood for. It’s early-liberated, earning money, having the vote, their potential husband probably died in the war, that kind of independence.

Two hundred years ago, bathrooms didn’t exist. The bathroom’s development has not been a straightforward matter, and you might be surprised to learn that many Tudor people had worse personal hygiene than their medieval ancestors.

I like all the types of supposed work that I do. It’s a privilege: I can’t believe I get paid for it.

A Georgian man’s shirt had a long tail, which he tucked between his legs rather like a nappy. Over it went his ‘breech liners’, the long, linen forerunners of drawers. All of this was intended to keep his unwashable outer clothes free from the sweat and stink of his skin.

I like to wear clothes that have some kind of relationship with the past.

As a curator, I’ve met endless people who feel a ‘special connection’ with Anne Boleyn, or Victorian prostitutes, or various other unlikely candidates.

As a child I ate all sorts of veg because my mother was a hippie and grew them all and made our clothes.

Lots of historians are sniffy about re-enactors.

Many British people have a snap of their younger self, posing next to a Yeoman Warder or Beefeater at the Tower of London. I’m no exception, and my youthful visit created such an impression that in later life I set out to become one of the curators of the Tower.

When it comes to history I am shameless. I will do whatever it takes to get people involved.

I’d prefer to cook for friends at home than go to a restaurant. My mum is a feeder and I get it from her – I know when I visit her there will be three different types of home-made cake waiting for me.

I think you can be happy every day, if you are in the flow.

One thing I know, and any female presenters will know this, is don’t reveal any body part or bend over because freaks will freeze-frame it and put it on their nasty messageboards.

There seems to me to be something admirable, indeed noble, about the people arguing over Richard III. They’re doers rather than naysayers, romantics rather than realists, people looking for meaning rather than numbness.

History was the subject that didn’t seem like work. It was enjoyable. That’s why I was drawn to doing it really.

You shouldn’t hate your body parts. I have lovely little ears and eyelashes so long they sometimes get tangled in the machinery when I have my eyes tested.

I’ve always being interested in clothes – and I’m also the curator of a significant dress collection with 12,000 objects in it – the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection at Kensington Palace.

My favourite accessory is a pair of long purple leather gloves.

Today’s builders and town planners believe people inhabit ‘places’. Yet medieval towns were perfect examples of what planners seek: densely populated, walkable communities in which people ate local, seasonal food, and rich and poor lived in close proximity.

I have many pairs of long gloves because my wrists get cold as I also like coats with short sleeves – what Jackie O would have called bracelet-length sleeves.

I’m very interested in Queen Victoria’s younger years at Kensington Palace. She was born in the dining room because it had stairs down to hot water in the kitchen.

My dad, a geologist, was an expert in glaciers and permafrost, so we moved to a lot of cold places such as Canada, Iceland and Norway.

Mum encouraged my love of history. She was always dragging me off to visit historic properties, and then I reached an age when I suddenly appreciated it. We have a big overlap in interests and often work together.

Medieval people didn’t have special rooms for sleeping, just a single living space for everything. They put up with this lack of privacy partly for the lack of other options.

I am quite old-fashioned: I wouldn’t consciously think ‘I am going to dress up in a sexy manner’ because it’s just not me. I like to look cheeky, friendly and approachable, and I wear bright colours, like a clown.

It’s our job as curators to open up Hampton Court to visitors, and to look after the buildings and collections for the future.

Medieval kings left the job of kindness to their queens. If the queen begged for someone not to be beheaded, the king could show mercy without losing face.

My job is basically organising things, putting labels on them and keeping them straight!

Medieval and Tudor people didn’t treat buildings as a semi-disposable resource like we do.

Working in a museum has given me a connection to people – to the rest of humanity – that I never had before.

What truly gives me joy is when I get a letter from a young woman who says they saw a programme, then read a book, then went to an evening class, and then studied a history degree at the Open University – and now I want your job.

My favorite thing is talking to people about history – that’s what I like doing. The sort of history I do isn’t just for professional historians.

I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing. The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.

Regency buildings are often said to lack the serenity of their early Georgian predecessors, or the intense scholarship of the subsequent Gothic revival.