Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.

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.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism's traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.

I grew up in a world where the social democratic state was the norm, not the exception.