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.

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.

These men were very much in the minority, but of course, being the 'Elect', they expected to be in a minority - the party of redemption. In fact they glorified in the slightness of their numbers, the self-purifying troop of Gideon's army... stormtroopers in the front line of the Reformation.

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.

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

The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.

At 11, 12 I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn.