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

DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

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.

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.

In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

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.