Florence Nightingale Quotes

England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.

Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.

We must restore faith in politics. Reform of the House of Lords is only one part of the answer, but it is a vital one.

The last romantic novel I think I read was 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles.'

I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.

I'm not gonna name names, but sometimes when reporters are talking, it gets a little boring because I don't have any jokes to tell because the questions are so serious.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid-1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say, he was a complicated and often combative man.

I continue faithful to the measure of Parliamentary reform brought forward by Mr. Pitt. I am firmly persuaded that at present a prodigious majority of the people of this country are adverse to the measure. In my view, so far from being an objection to the discussion, this is rather a recommendation.

Canadians understand that our Senate, as it stands today, must either change or … vanish

I could get on [with the Kennedys] because I spoke Boston — meaning you never let the other person finish their sentence

I think of being ornate as a Victorian quality, little to do with Shakespeare. But even Dickens wasn't ornate; he wrote with flow and naturalism.

A lot of London's image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.

The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government.

Many of the Victorian and Edwardian activists who campaigned for Irish home rule, for instance, also wanted what they called 'home rule all round': separate parliaments not simply for Ireland but also for the Scots and the Welsh - and for the English.

One of my favourite books when I was young was 'Wuthering Heights.'

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

'The Battle of Dorking' was reprinted as a book and became a best-seller.

I'm sort of nerdy, I liked Shakespeare and Chekhov and the classics.

The Victorian Age was very stimulating, historically impressive.

I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.