121 Quotes by David Starkey

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

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.

We have this extraordinarily unbalanced constitution, in which we have an elected dictatorship of the prime minister.

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.

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.

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

Human beings enjoy the myth of romance.

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.

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.