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

I think that it is important to be gregarious, and that friendships are not just a leisure pursuit, that they are an integral part of what it is to be human, and one does better work if one has a circle of friends that is active.

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

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I'm the least authoritarian professor you'll ever meet.

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

I think the condition of imperial denial is a handicap because if you do not recognize that you are essentially performing the functions of an empire, you are incapable of learning from the mistakes of past empires.

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