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

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

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

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

The peasant of early modern France inhabited a world of step-mothers and orphans, of inexorable, unending toil, and of brutal emotions, both raw and repressed.The human condition has changed so much since then that we can hardly imagine the way it appeared to people whose lives really were nasty, brutish, and short. This is why we need to reread Mother Goose.

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