David Starkey

“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.”

“My father, Bob, was a sweet, gentle man who was prone to frustration. I hardly knew him as a child, but that was typical of those days. He got up early, came home late and wanted to be left alone.”

“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.”

“The Tudors' is terrible history with no point. It's wrong for no purpose.”

“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 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 mean, really, compared to a senior civil servant, I'm very modestly paid!”

“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.”

“To footnote properly takes time.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Delving into history is not an escape for me. I'm like a detective, sniffing for clues with a terrier-like excitement.”

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

“Churchill may have made some horrendous mistakes - Gallipoli, for one - but he had a sense of the profundity and integrity of the English experience. By contrast, Blair believes he excised the past in 1997, though what no one on the left seems to have realised is that his historic mission was to destroy the Labour party, not the Tories.”

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

“I've always had a naughty streak.”

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

“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.”

“I hate niceness.”

“Academics aren't paid very much, but as a single gay man I was never badly off. You don't have kids. You don't have a non-working wife's insatiable demand for shoes or wallpaper.”