I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.

The fact that I spend a lot of time in the 18th century doesn't mean I'm not concerned with the 21st.

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

It's important to make clear to all the schools at Harvard the central role of the library.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.