History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.

There's a fearful term that's in fashion at the moment - closure. People apparently believe it is desirable and attainable.

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.

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