“Given my upbringing and my life in general, it's not so hard to imagine that my mind would capsize eventually.”

“For reasons I can only guess, my mother always instructed me that it was impolite to tell the truth...Whatever she lacked in versimilitude, she more than made up for in stealth.”

“The Internet is to our intellectual life what the universal unconscious is to our psychological life. In fact, the Internet is the new universal unconscious. It's not even a metaphor anymore.”

“It happened in the autumn of the year, when murder feels at home, because so many other things are dying.”

“Sometimes history turns on that little: a single moment, a single bullet.”

“I had learned many times that the more you try to get people to deny their illusions, the stronger the illusions can become. But if you indulge those delusions instead, they often fall apart on their own.”

“I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term 'Holocaust' had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read 'The Grapes of Wrath' by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.”