The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

From the days of the Founding Fathers, right to this (2008) election, how and where America fights to defend its freedom, has been the ultimate question in its politics. The one that triggers rage and sorrow; the one that asks is the price of blood too dear? Or, if it is to stay true to its convictions, does America have no coice but to put its lives on the line?

Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.