Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

Love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

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

Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: "Everyone says, 'Never again. Never again.' But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw".