All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths - all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print: the main thing is to make history, not to write it.

If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience.