Peace is a question of will. All conflicts can be settled, and there are no excuses for allowing them to become eternal.

Wars and conflicts are not inevitable. They are caused by human beings.

The only people that can make peace are the parties to the conflict, and just as they are responsible for the conflict and its consequences, so should they be given responsibility and recognition for the peace.

Mediators do not choose the conflicts they became involved in, but the parties to the conflict choose the mediator. Their participation as intermediaries is based on the trust of all the conflicting parties.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less.

If I thought there was any hope of turning 'World War Z' into a movie, I wouldn't have written it as a giant, epic, global story, because that requires a giant, epic, global budget.

Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my knowledge of Penkovsky's role was thoroughly confirmed, and so was the Soviet military men's residual sense of humiliation at Khrushchev's 'blink'.