Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

To be brave, by definition, one has first to be afraid.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.