Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

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

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

If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

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".