The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in crisis, the speaking scroll was designed to survive even incineration, because the scribes who had composed and edited it had memorised its oral traditions and its texts as part of their basic education.

It is already apparent that the ‘minimalist’ view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there’s a great reverence for history – though it’s history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.

The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the world of the village went from impoverished claustrophobia to traumatized infection. A hundred years later, everything had been upended, courtesy of King Death.

Walking on camera is damn hard. It’s a Jewish problem. The rangy stride across the blasted moor is not really a Jewish thing.

Asked what he thought was the significance of the French Revolution, the Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai is reported to have answered, “It’s too soon to tell.

Almost everywhere else in Europe, the more military the state, the stronger the king – except in Britain. Here it was parliament, not the monarchy, who signed the cheques. The longer the war went on, the stronger parliament became, as the purse on which it sat grew bigger and bigger.

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.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future...

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.