To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree.

With the passage of years, not all of Dicken's readers remained infatuated with his pathos. One generation's sublimity became another generation's kitsch.

What interests me, and has always interested me, has been modernism.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.