A. J. P. Taylor Quotes

If you read any of my books, they tend to have a strong historical perspective.

I never put out a history, I put out a dramatic history.

Most of us get our history through story.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

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.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

I can see myself wanting to write a historical novel - you don't need to worry about references to reality TV or pop music, you can just get on with the basics of story and character.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.

I think you'll find a lot of actors will be interested in history because it sparks your imagination so much. When you enter a period of history, your imagination just goes wild in creating the world, which is really what acting is.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.