Reality is a powerful solvent.

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

The American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.