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

I do think we're on the edge of a terrifying world, and that many young people know that but don't know how to talk about it.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

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

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.'

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.