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

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

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

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".

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

We have responsibilities for others, not just across space but across time. We have responsibilities to people who came before us. They left us a world of institutions, ideas or possibilities for which we, in turn, owe them something. One of the things we owe them is not to squander them.

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.