My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

Israel today is bad for the Jews.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

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.

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.

At a certain point, to remain slightly tangential to wherever I was became a way of 'being Tony': by not being anything that everyone else was.