Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange….

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle..

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough….

Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock. It is... difficult to think of a….

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress..

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises..

The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me..

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?.

From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given t….

Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, ….

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present..

Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but t….

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated..

I'm helplessly and permanently a Red Sox fan. It was like first love...You never forget. It's special. It's the first time I saw a ballpark. I'd thou….

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings….

The way history is currently taught in schools, jumping from Hitler to the Henrys, is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode fo….

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. Peo….

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor ….

I don't really like the autumn. For me it is the beginning of winter and I hate the winter. White, the colour of death..

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them..

The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won..