There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.

It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

All history, of course, is the history of wars.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.