121 Quotes by David Starkey

To footnote properly takes time.

Writing is a real activity conducted in real time.

When you look at the history of the monarchy, there's one period that stands out where it is held in universally, awe-inspired reverence and esteem. It's not Henry VIII, its certainly not Victoria; it's the first 70 years of the 20th century.

The Windsor monarchy is held in just awe. The whole process of criticism of the personal behaviour of the monarch is put in absolute suspense until about 1977, when it begins again.

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.

I've always challenged authority.

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.

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

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.