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

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

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.

The pleasures of mental agility are much overstated, inevitably - as it now appears to me - by those not exclusively dependent upon them.

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

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.

The different American experience of the 20th Century is crucial because the lesson of the century for Europe, which essentially is that the human condition is tragic, led it to have a build a welfare system and a set of laws and social arrangements that are more prophylactic than idealistic. It's not about building perfect futures; it's about preventing terrible pasts. I think that is something that Europeans in the second half of the 20th century knew in their bones and Americans never did, and it's one of the big differences between the two Western cultures.