Oral history is a recipe for complete misrepresentation because almost no one tells the truth, even when they intend to.

So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.

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

My arguments for liberal empire or whatever you want to call it - hegemony, primacy, you name it - are really activated by a sense that the alternatives involve more violence, more repression, more hardship.

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.

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

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.