My mother lived in Holland and during World War II was incarcerated in a Japanese camp for three years.

We had four years of world war which the peoples endured only because they were told that their sufferings would free humanity forever from the scourge of war.

Four years of world war at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.

Britain which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed is now being bombed and burned into democracy.

I had just turned 10-years-old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and plunged America into World War II.

What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.

I'm a lad of the '60s. I started a magazine to try and end the Vietnam war but it was a number of years before I had the profile the financial resources and the time to do more.

Republicans have been losing the war of words for years now. Now they are just caving because they don't even want to try. I don't agree with that approach.

And I'm a slow writer: five six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.