All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.

A historian is battling all the time to remember as much as possible.

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.

You really struggle to be a successful empire if you are also the world's biggest debtor.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.

All empires have depended on local legitimacy and local collaboration; they are not based primarily on coercion. An imperial rule that relies wholly on coercion can't endure. It's too expensive.