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.

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.

The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.

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.

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.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?