David Starkey is right, ageing makes you better at your job

In his long career as an academic and broadcaster, the historian David Starkey has acquired a reputation as a virtuoso controversialist. In private, he is the kindest and most courteous of men, but his dazzling public ferocity once earned him the reputation of “the rudest man in Britain”.

There seems no intention to provoke in his latest utterance – a touching personal reflection on the effects of love and loss on his working life. Yet what he says about bringing a lifetime’s experience to the understanding of history may prove to be more subtly subversive than any of his more teasing obiter dicta.

Discussing his latest project – an exhibition about the Tudors at Hever Castle, once the home of Anne Boleyn – Starkey, whose partner of 21 years died three years ago, explained that he had “used my own experience of mourning and of joy. You take the dry facts of history and with memories in your own life, you realise how you should understand them.”

Ours is not an era in which life experience is much regarded. Ageing is overwhelmingly associated with decline. Yet here is Professor Starkey, claiming that getting older has made him better at what he does, by making him more fully human.

“If youth knew; if age could” lamented the 16th-century scholar and aphorist, Henri Estienne. His 500-year-old commonplace has proved strangely durable (except that these days we tend not to credit the old with wisdom). Professor Starkey defiantly subverts the old saw, insisting on the beauty and resonance of late flowering. Age knows, he insists, and age can.

Examinations these days have something of a bad rap. Last year, a group of elite London girls schools announced that they were abandoning their entrance examinations, “amid fears that it is putting children’s mental health at risk”. From 2021, the public schools Westminster, St Paul’s and Wellington will drop the Common Entrance examination, as too stressful for prospective pupils.

But yesterday The Sunday Telegraph reported details of “the most difficult exam in the world” – the competitive examination for a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, a graduate college that selects just two applicants each year.

In my own Oxford days, the All Souls exams had a formidable reputation: the translation paper, in which a candidate of my era was said to have translated a passage of Hungarian into Arabic, Old Norse into Mandarin and so on; the dining test, in which a candidate was allegedly faced with the tricky issue of whether to spit or swallow the troublesome pips of a cherry tart. Several of my clever friends sat the exam. None succeeded.

Yet this year’s exam questions look like tremendous fun: “Would you rather be a vampire or a zombie?” “Defend tweeting”. As a naive 17-yearold from a grammar school with no Oxbridge history, I took the Oxbridge entrance examination, in which the questions – identical in tone to those of the All Souls exam – struck me as an irresistible opportunity to take an idea for a walk.

That freethinking opportunity had been rare at my school, and in today’s exam-fraught educational climate it is rarer still. I wish, rather than deploying the blunt instrument of cognitive tests for young children, that it were possible once again for education to embrace the notion of taking an idea for a walk.

READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion