Tony Blair is already secretly grinning at the prospect of his third victory. You don’t have to settle for that.

I write to remember. I read to forget.

We must rediscover the habit of thinking the best of each other.

We’re not saying, ‘We’re politicians, trust us.’ We know you don’t trust us.

The logic of what they are saying is that there shouldn't be any limit at all and that we should have quite unlimited detention without charge.

I make no apologies for any inconsistencies or contradictions in my essays. Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking all together. The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.

People often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into disastrous decisions and miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign societies with which they have to deal.

The true use of history, whether civil or military, is not to make man clever for the next time, it is to make him wise forever.

History is what we read, write and think about the past.

We must rediscover the habit of thinking the best of each other