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

From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given them the power to challenge constituted authority. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by product of revolution, it was the source of energy.

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

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

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 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.

Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.