Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.
So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.
Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.
We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.
Medieval learning was really advanced.
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.
As historians, we spend days in archives, gazing at account books. We train would-be historians in the arts of deciphering letters and documents, early Latin, scribal handwriting, medieval French.
But no, I don't think I'm particularly drawn to the period roles or the medieval roles.
There are some examples of medieval kings who were terrible human beings but were nevertheless good kings.
My concern is to keep religion and the state separated. I don't think that religion and politics go together. When you see political decisions colored by religion, decisions that affect us all... I thought: 'I do not want to go back to medieval times.'
In middle school, I was really into the 'Redwall' series, about anthropomorphic rodents in medieval times. I had a bowl cut, too, if you need the full imagery.
I decorated my house like a medieval gothic castle, European-style. Chandeliers and red velvet curtains. My bedroom is pink and black, my bathroom is totally Hello Kitty, I have a massive pink couch and a big antique gold cross.
The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.
I've come off horses and fought in medieval battles using axes, hammers and swords as well as fists. Getting your teeth knocked out is an occupational hazard.
When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.
I believe very much in a dialogue between buildings - I believe it's always been there. I think buildings have different identities and live very well next to each other. We always have the shock of the new, and that's fine. The renaissance style is totally different from the medieval, and they have a dialogue across time.
My first published novel was 'Mother of Demons,' which is simply 'The High Crusade' standing on its head. Poul Anderson placed his medieval human heroes in a futuristic alien setting; I placed my futuristic human heroes in a bronze age alien setting.
The worst thing that happens to you at college if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you will miss two hours of someone reading scintillating anecdotes about Medieval Ireland. The worst thing that happens to you in life if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you might lose your job as a first responder.
Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.
So much of our fictional medievalism is distorted through a lens of Protestantism and the Reformation, slanted even further through Victorian anti-Catholicism. The depiction of actual medieval attitudes toward the Church is remarkably rare.
If I can't face my accusers, that's a joke. We did that in medieval times.
Airports and 'leg room' on planes are a form of medieval torture.
We now think it hilarious that medieval streets were used as open sewers. Equally, our descendants will say: 'You won't believe this, but people were once allowed to hurl a couple of tons of dangerous metal around smashing into each other.'
If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
I'd really love to check out medieval times. I'm obsessed with that kind of stuff, like on a horseback with a sword.
I have a real passion for anything medieval, which is why I love the drama series 'Game Of Thrones.'
The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial zodiac, too.
It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.
In the ancient world, taxes were paid in kind: landowners paid in crops or livestock; the landless paid with their labor. Taxing trade made medieval monarchs rich and funded the early-modern state.
My final historical romance came out December 2005. While I enjoyed writing medieval romances, I was also dying to write something with more edge.
I seem to be quite drawn to the medieval, magical fantasies, as it were.
Marketing is not bragging, and touting one's wares is not evil. The baker in the medieval town square must holler, 'Fresh rolls!' if he hopes to feed the townfolk.
'Game of Thrones' is a fantasy show not dedicated to any specific time, but it seems to exist in sort of a 1400s medieval fantasy world, and in that setting, I wouldn't have had a six-pack.
I was born on September 30, 1939, in Rosheim, a small medieval city of Alsace in France. My father, Pierre Lehn, then a baker, was very interested in music, played the piano and the organ, and became, later, having given up the bakery, the organist of the city. My mother Marie kept the house and the shop.
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.
