I know exactly how and where I am going to die. The only question is when.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

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.'

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?