Hamilton – I disagree with him much more than I agree with him. This book is very much a book about a father and a son. The father is painted as the bad guy, and the son is the good guy, struggling to break free. I don’t accept that interpretation, or that framework of analysis. Nonetheless, Hamilton writes with a verve, an electricity, a passion, that’s rare among academic historians. As a researcher, he’s extraordinary.

It’s very gratifying to grow utterly incensed by the Mail Online and come away from it full of fury and absolute outrage at its prejudice and xenophobia — and support for Brexit.

I disagree with virtually everything I’ve ever seen on Fox News, but I watch it anyway.

But Wiebe didn’t have the evidence to sustain many of the assertions that fed his thesis. Many of the things which he said happened in the Gilded Age had happened earlier and other things didn’t happen at all. Nonetheless, it’s a great feat of storytelling to fit so many disparate details into a simple framework. Even though I disagree with Wiebe, I always keep my eye on The Search for Order as a model of historical writing.

Ask your parents questions straight away, or you’ll never know.

Not reading medicine.

I took Nicole out to dinner for the first time on 19 October, 1991. After that, everything changed.

I was jealous as hell.

It was a sustained nervous breakdown really, over a long period.

I wrote a play called Knuckle in 1974, which opened to hostile reviews during the three-day week.