Historical Interest Quotes

Any period is fascinating: the more ancient, the better.

I grew up loving history.

I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.

I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.

I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

I'd always been interested in Nigeria's past.

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'm a bit of a history goon, and I love all that. Anything that's medieval-based up until, probably, the Tudor period and just after, I'm quite into.

With my students, I always have to sell my subject because I know when you're 19, 20 years old, you've got other things on your mind besides American history. What I have to do is make this as compelling as possible.

I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.

When we think about the past, we think, 'It must have been so boring.' It's actually not.

I think I was interested in history without knowing it and that became very clear when I arrived in France. Everything that I was really interested in was there, but I knew nothing, no education, no art education, no education beyond high school. It was extremely overwhelming and it still is.

There are so many books out about Abraham Lincoln out now because it's the bicentennial of his birth. I've known a lot about the Civil War, but I'm just getting more into it.

I love anything to do with history.

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.

History has been my primary intellectual passion ever since, as a boy in Southern California, I began reading books on World War II and the life of Winston Churchill.

I was a big history buff as a teenager.

I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel.

To me, it was a sad fate to have been born into a period and a world where everything was in tip-top order, and the only real excitement was to be found in history books and occasionally also in the paper.

President Obama had a few historians at the White House for a couple of dinners. I was lucky enough to be one of those asked, and he was very interested in Ronald Reagan, and I came away feeling that.

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 love reading about history. Sometimes, I feel I was born in the wrong era. There was more creativity in the air when people were still discovering new worlds.

I like American history.

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

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.