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1. As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.
2. In my view, Germany could and should have made reparations for its aggression in World War I — but was the risk of renewed war worth forcing it to do so?
3. I first read the ‘Raj Quartet’ in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott’s decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.
4. History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.
5. If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.
6. War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.
7. As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.
8. Women are interested in relationships and how other societies manage those relationships. They may have been constrained in what roles were open to them, but they could question and observe, and they could write it down.
9. Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, is a true populist; Senator Bernie Sanders, the former U.S. presidential candidate who campaigned for Hillary Clinton after losing his battle for the Democratic Party’s nomination, is not.
10. The act of apology is something that most societies take very seriously indeed. It is an admission of wrong done to the victims and an acceptance of blame.
11. By the start of August 1914, it was dawning on the British that a major war was about to break out on mainland Europe. Public opinion and, crucially, the cabinet was deeply divided on whether to intervene or stay out.
12. Climate change respects no borders.
13. The Italian futurists, the German expressionists, and the British vorticists were fascinated by speed and the ways the modern world was shattering conventions. The old ways of painting, writing, sculpting, and composing no longer seemed adequate to capture the world.
14. History matters.
15. We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.
16. I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one.
17. An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.
18. Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.
19. If you start thinking war is inevitable, then in your own times, you don’t resist it as strongly as you should.
20. The Canadian government has had a field day apologising for past policies towards a series of ethnic groups: Italian, Ukrainian, Sikh, Chinese, Japanese and Jews.