David Starkey Quotes

Author Image

David Starkey

Profession : Historian

Birth : January 3, 1945

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

David Starkey

The use of computers and other mobile devices has to be so carefully controlled. As we discovered with 'Dream School' rather awkwardly, it can become a source of total disruption that destroys the co-operative learning experience.

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

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

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

The reign of Henry VIII is the axis around which England turns.

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child with these dreadful calliper things, and in push-chairs and God knows what else. I had no interest in sport and no ability at it, and so on. But on the other hand, I had a very powerful imaginative life.

David Starkey

What Black Lives Matter is doing is a deliberate inversion of the proper processes of historical analysis. It is beginning with a conclusion. And it is adapting facts to that conclusion. You should begin with the facts and work forward to a conclusion.

David Starkey

I was born a cripple, with two club feet, and mild polio in the left leg. I was in orthopaedic boots right through to my teenage years and, unfortunately, the fashion then was for light shoes. I discovered very quickly that I had a sharp mind and an exceedingly sharp tongue.

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

I went to a progressive primary school in Kendal, followed by a boys' grammar school and then Cambridge.

David Starkey

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England.

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.

David Starkey

You could say that my life since has been a sustained act of luxurious rebellion.

David Starkey

The mere mention of domestic service brings some people out in spots of outrage, but there is a crying need for relatively low-level employment. It's ridiculous that people at the top are killing themselves in demanding jobs and then coming home to mow their own lawns.

David Starkey

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.

David Starkey

If you make a book which is little more than putting a television script on the page, and add a few pictures, that would be a bad thing. But I would never do that because I happen to be very interested in language, in writing.

David Starkey