It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.

[talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.