The American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.

It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.

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.

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.

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 American financial and military commitment really only kicks in with Korea. Not that Korea was the real game for the Americans; their real fear was that this was just the prelude to a second Korea in Germany. We now know from the Soviet archives that the last thing Stalin was going to do was start a war in Central Europe. The Americans didn't know that, and it was the fear that he might which transformed NATO from a sort of shell game into a real military alliance. That total commitment basically transformed the Marshal Plan into military aid.

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.