“I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly...” — David Starkey Quote

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.

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.

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.

Not to invent yourself is to be false. To follow preordained rules is a profound betrayal of what it means to be human.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

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.

Vinicius has a mental strength that is admirable.

'Divergent,' directed by Neil Burger, displayed an admirable seriousness and some grim verve in laying out the boundaries of novelist Veronica Roth's dystopia - six segregated but ostensibly harmonious regions defined by their inhabitants' skills.