We Need To Learn... How War Brutalises

Unlike Memory, Which Confirms And Reinforces Itself, History Contributes To The Disenchantment Of The World.

Judaism For Me Is A Sensibility Of Collective Self-questioning And Uncomfortable Truth-telling. I Feel A Debt Of Responsibility To This Past. It Is Why I Am Jewish.

I Was Born Accidentally. I Lived Accidentally In London. We Nearly Migrated To New Zealand. So Much Of My Life Has Been A Product Of Chance, I Can't See A Meaning In It At All.

After 1945 What Happened Was Rather The Opposite: With One Major Exception Boundaries Stayed Broadly Intact And People Were Moved Instead.

I Started Work On My First French History Book In 1969; On 'socialism In Provence' In 1974; And On The Essays In Marxism And The French Left In 1978. Conversely, My First Non-academic Publication, A Review In The 'tls', Did Not Come Until The Late 1980s, And It Was Not Until 1993 That I Published My First Piece In The 'new York Review.'