The Best Years Are When You Know

The English Have Always Been Greedy For News Of Times Past, With That Mixture Of Fatalism And Melancholy Which Is Part Of The National Character.

I Wanted To Be A Poet When I Was 20; I Had No Interest In Fiction Or Biography And Precious Little Interest In History, But Those Three Elements In My Life Have Become The Most Important.

One Can Forgive Shakespeare Anything, Except One's Own Bad Lines.

And The Smell Of The Library Was Always The Same - The Musty Odour Of Old Clothes Mixed With The Keener Scent Of Unwashed Bodies, Creating What The Chief Librarian Had Once Described As 'the Steam Of The Social Soup.'

Why Should A Novelist Not Also Be A Historian? To Force Unnatural Divisions Within The English Language Is To Work Against Its Capacious And Accommodating Nature. To Expect A Writer To Produce Only Novels, Or Only Histories, Is Equivalent To Demanding From A Composer That He Or She Write Only String Quartets Or Piano Sonatas.