The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.

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

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

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

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.

Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.