We Are Not Merely Historians But Also

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.'

Yugoslavia Served As A Reminder That The Lessons Of World War Two Were Only Partially Learned. There's A Great Line Someone Wrote In The Middle Of The 1990s, At The Time When Clinton Was Agonizing About Whether Or Not To Go Into Bosnia: "everyone Says, 'never Again. Never Again.' But All They Really Mean Is Never Again Will Germans Kill Jews In The Streets Of Warsaw".

I Do Think We're On The Edge Of A Terrifying World, And That Many Young People Know That But Don't Know How To Talk About It.

It's Important To Remember That World War Ii Was Experienced Very Much As A Continuity In That Sense. Most Of World War Ii In Most Of Europe Wasn't A War; It Was An Occupation. The War Was At The Beginning And The End, Except In Germany And The Soviet Union, And Even There Really Only At The End. So The Rest Of Time It's An Occupation, Which In Some Ways Was Experienced As An Extension Of The Interwar Period. World War Ii Was Simply An Extreme Form, In A Whole New Key, Of The Disruption Of Normal Life That Began In 1914.

Love, It Seems To Me, Is That Condition In Which One Is Most Contentedly Oneself.