I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn't want to be a journalist - I wanted to be a historian.

I was very fortunate to be elected to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, which is, in effect, a small research center where you are given three years to do whatever work you want.

The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet.

All of us are citizens in a republic much larger than the Republic of America. It is the Republic of Letters, a realm of the mind that extends everywhere, without police, national boundaries, or disciplinary frontiers.