My generation those who were students in the late 60s was always, in the words of the Who, talking about our generation. That's what we thought of ourselves, as the most important thing since sliced bread. And the "we" that we meant was really the Western Europeans and American generation. And as I think back I suppose I have a sense of guilt on behalf of my generation, a sense that we were terribly provincial and didn't understand the really important stuff that was going on in Eastern Europe.

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.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

But I'm English. We don't do uplifting.

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?

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