Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

I can still boss people around. I can still write. I can still read. I can still eat, and I can still have very strong views.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.

There is nothing to be said for being crippled. You don't see the world better or clearer, nor do you develop some special set of skills by way of compensation.

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

There were various different keys in which European history had tended to be written. One is the lyrical key, the idea that somehow, in Bretton-Woods in 1945, a bunch of well-intentioned men got together and said, "This can't go on; let's build a European Union." And it just wasn't like that.