Anatomically modern humans are found up to 200,000 years ago; behaviourally modern humans appear very recently in evolutionary time, as far as evidence now exists, perhaps within a window of 50-100,000 years ago, a flick of an eye in evolutionary time.

Wikileaks is a democratizing force. Its giving individuals access to decisions and thinking by their representatives and in a democracy that ought to be reflexive.

If you look back to the anti-intervention movements, what were they? Let's take the Vietnam War - the biggest crime since the Second World War. You couldn't be opposed to the war for years. The mainstream liberal intellectuals were enthusiastically in support of the war. In Boston, a liberal city where I was, we literally couldn't have a public demonstration without it being violently broken up, with the liberal press applauding, until late 1966.

I can understand the idea that there is a conspiracy. In fact, in much of the world there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense. They [CIA] created a monster and now they are appalled by it.

What can you do to mitigate the likelihood that Iran will develop nuclear weapons? There's a very simple method: move towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone, which everybody in the world wants, but the US blocks.

A dramatic, evocative, thoughtful and very accessible account of one of the most important stories of the century - and one of the most ominous, unless citizens are aroused to action to rein in abusive state power.

America has always been the richest and most secure, and sometimes the most dangerous country in the world. In the early years, the danger was to everybody near us, slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans. It finally expanded in 1898 to the Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines.