My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.

Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it’s a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.

Blair is regarded by most people in Britain as a smarmy git.

What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

In the modern age where everything is connected to everything, the most important thing about what you can do is what you can do with others.

We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.