David Starkey

David Starkey CBE FSA
Starkey when a lecturer at LSE in the early 1980s
Born	David Robert Starkey (1945-01-03) 3 January 1945 (age 72) Kendal, Westmorland, UK
Occupation	Historian, television personality
Language	English
Nationality	British
Ethnicity	English
Alma mater	Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

David Robert StarkeyCBE FSA RHistS (born 3 January 1945) is a British constitutional historian and a radio and television presenter.

Born the only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before studying at Cambridge through a scholarship. There he specialised in Tudor history, writing a thesis on King Henry VIII's household. From Cambridge he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer in history until 1998. He has written several books on the Tudors.

Starkey is a well-known radio and television personality, first appearing on television in 1977. While a regular contributor to the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, his acerbic tongue earned him the sobriquet of "rudest man in Britain"; his frequent appearances on Question Time have been received with criticism and applause. Starkey has presented several history documentaries. In 2002 he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 for 25 hours of programming, and in 2011 was a contributor on the Channel 4 series Jamie's Dream School.

David Starkey was born on 3 January 1945 in Kendal. He is the only child of Robert Starkey and Elsie Lyon, Quakers who had married 10 years previously in Bolton, at a Friends meeting house. His father, the son of a cotton spinner, was a foreman in a washing-machine factory, while his mother followed in her father's footsteps and became a cotton weaver and later a cleaner. Starkey is equivocal about his mother, describing her as both "wonderful", in that she helped develop his ambition, and "monstrous", intellectually frustrated and living through her son. "She was a wonderful but also very frightening parent. Finally, she was a Pygmalion. She wanted a creature, she wanted something she had made." Her dominance contrasted sharply to his father, who was "poetic, reflective, rather solitary...as a father he was weak." Their relationship was "distant", but improved after his mother's death in 1977.