Claire Tomalin Quotes

Historians usually record events based on the time and date of when they occurred.

I read a lot of history for fun.

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.'

I don't have a strong interest in history.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

I don't normally do pure historical work.

I do love history. I loved learning about wars and things in school.

I've always been fascinated by history.

History is not made of up major media headlines and daily blogs and attacks.

History is past politics, and politics present history.

The historian’s imperative has no teeth.

Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

I have never known a great deal about any of the historical figures I have written about until I actually started researching the book. If I knew a great deal about the person, I would not have been interested in writing the book.

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mold the social life of mankind.

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some weight to the hidden private life of ordinary people

I write to learn the flow of history.

The context of history proved invaluable.

History is an accumulative science, gradually gathering truth through the steady and plodding efforts of countless practitioners turning out countless monographs

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.

I love the past. I read about the past all the time.