"When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it."

"At a certain age it just became apparent to me that this was probably the work that I would have to do."

"I think I have a strange relationship with time. I'm not really aware of that time passing. I don't feel that I'm wasteful with time. But I'm not aware of it passing."

"One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible."

"The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people."

"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."

"The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It's not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically."

"Justice is the harmonious balance between individual liberty and collective good. A lesson woven into the fabric of human history."