Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

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

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

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. It is... difficult to think of a single natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture. The cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature.

The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?