The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

School-leavers unfortunately will come away thinking the First World War consisted simply of 'going over the top' on the Western Front to slaughter in no-man's-land, when the conflict extended so much further, to the collapse of four empires and numerous civil wars.

The temptation in any approaching crisis or conflict is, because people haven't got a clue what lies ahead, they're always searching into the past for some sort of pattern ... to galvanise the nation or their supporters and put themselves on a pedestal to sound Churchillian or Rooseveltian.

Every country has its own perspective on the Second World War. This is not surprising when experiences and memories are so different.

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in women.

The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties.

The only cure for grief is action.

Black-marketeers are really knowing, intelligent, and ordinarily responsible people, and when they indulge in black-marketing, I think they ought to be very severely punished because they undermine the entire system of control and regulation of foodstuffs and essential commodities, and cause wholesale starvation and want and even death.