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

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

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.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

We need to learn... how war brutalises and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonise our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.

The East European small countries have a sense of betrayal, of having been forgotten by Western leaders.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.