Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

To collude in the minimisation of British history on the grounds of its imagined irrelevance to our rebranded national future, or from a suspicion that it does no more than recycle patriotic pieties unsuited to a global marketplace, would be an act of appallingly self-inflicted collective memory loss.

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.

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?

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.