David Starkey

I’m David Starkey.  I’m a historian and I am sitting here in the library of The Red House in Kent, where I live and where I work.  It’s 1720 roughly, but has rooms added in the 19th Century.

It was completed refitted in the 1950s by my predecessor here, a former Ambassador, who rejoiced in the name of Sir Hugh [Knatchford-Hugerson].  and he, I suppose, wrote the first book to be written in this room, a history of his family.  I do something different, but I’m slightly aware of his ghost here when I write.

Can I take all the millions watching into my deep confidence and promise you won’t repeat?  I never really much cared for the aesthetic of the Tudor period.  I mean, who would want to dress like Henry the Eighth, still less, I suppose, to dress like Elizabeth the First?   I’m fascinated by them intellectually, but I’ve never wanted to live in a Tudor house.  I mean they can be quite romantic and all the rest of it, but that’s not my scene.  I like the 18th Century.  I like the Georgian.  I even like the slightly grander treatment of the 19th Century, you know with dining rooms in red and drawing rooms in yellow and kitchens in green and all that kind of thing.  I like that.  

It would be nice to say that environment mattered.  Well, it matters to me in the sense I like a nice room, I like it to be comfortable, I like it to be warm, but when I’m doing certain types of work, I like my books around me.  The honest truth is that providing it is quiet, and I’ve got my computer, and I’ve got a comfortable chair and a desk, I can write anywhere.

The essential thing about a desk is that it’s big and that it’s stable.  I also like an extra space at the side, as it leaves lots of room for piles of paper, which you’re constantly moving, juggling and shifting.

Writing is also a very, very physical activity.  Beyond that I like my pair of lamps, they are Art Deco.  It’s unusual that such a pair have actually survived together.  There’s nothing on the desk really that matters or that I’m hugely sentimental about.  I’m amused by a mug I have, which is a souvenir of one of my television shows.

I don’t want to have a window that I am compelled to look out of and the one thing I don’t want is to see other human beings.  So what I want is a room in which I’m aware of books.  I don’t want it to be very bright or very brightly lit.  What I loved about this room was that the light was that of an artist’s studio.  And I think that’s a good light in which to work.

History is a rather odd subject.  You can’t invent your facts; that wonderful thing you can do as a novelist. This is one of the reasons a lot of people have actually thought history a rather low-ranking form of literature.

The great Dr Johnson said it came right down at the bottom of the pile, because there was no need for imagination; everything was just handed to you.  Actually, it isn’t like that.  It’s certainly not like that if you work in my kind of period, where you have separate bits and pieces of information.  You’ve got to work out what story it is that they tell.

You’ve got to use your imagination much of the time.  You can’t distort chronology, the order of events in time very much, but you must make the story intelligible, attractive, interesting to the reader.