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With 'The Tudors,' I had a huge amount of material, I mean so many books and so much stuff about what they really said. So, in a way it was kind of trying to strip it out and find the stories inside all this material.

We should have scant notion of the gardens of these New England colonists in the seventeenth century were it not for a cheerful traveller named John Josselyn, a man of everyday tastes and much inquisitiveness, and the pleasing literary style which comes from directness, and an absence of self-consciousness.

I could only speak in the smallest, most intimate circles about the real reasons which made me undertake the changeover of the plants for certain lines of production for I had to expect that many people would not understand me.

They pay little attention to what we say and prefer to read tea leaves.

The English may love gardening and fishing, but they have never struck me as being close to nature. Their way of expression is 'the hollyhocks are awfully good' sort of thing, all done in very good taste. The savagery of nature is something they don't dwell upon.

Finally, there's a sense in which I look at this Westminster village and London intelligentsia as an outsider.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.

The spirit of non-conformity is as prevalent now in my part of west Yorkshire as it was in the time of my two immediate predecessors, Mike Wood and Elizabeth Peacock.

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something.