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There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

Older people may have always existed throughout history, but they were rare.

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

English history turned on Henry VIII and his desires, his whims almost. And it was down to Cromwell to make those desires happen. He was the guy that fixed it. He was also the guy that eased Henry's conscience. Because Henry VIII had an enormous, tender conscience and great theological knowledge.

There might well have been an Irish great-great-grandfather of mine back then in the 1800s.

The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality.