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" If someone asks me to go to speak at, say, Princeton, I might or might not go. But if someone asks me from Norman, Oklahoma, I certainly will go. "

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" Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between. "

" Silence, this will surprise you not, isn't really a Jewish concept. "

" The Jews invented a portable religion in the shape of the Bible, the Torah, and eventually the Talmud, and with other portable forms of writing. So it's now possible to carry the religion, that is embedded in that writing, away from the ruins of political and military power. "

" History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative. "

" In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics. "

" I find it very hard to write about Jewish history. "

" In the Einstein way, I can't believe in a universe that doesn't have some sort of prime mover, identical with all of created nature. I have a whole lot of a harder time with supposing the fine print of the Torah was a direct revelation. "

" As a schoolboy, poetry seemed defined by preciousness. It was all very rarefied. "

" I was conscious of being wordy as a child. I was a terrible talker. I memorised the Latin names of flowers at five; I was shown off as a freak. My father encouraged me to be wordier than I was: he'd been a street orator at the time of Mosley, and his ideal primary concert speech was Henry V's speech before Harfleur. "

" The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication. "

" Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country. "

" America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words. "

" My mother was an awful cook, an exceptionally awful kosher cook, but I stayed kosher until I got to college, even though I'd long stopped believing in God. "

" I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected. "

" I am passionately invested in the survival of Israel and everything Israel represents. But I am extremely critical of much of its policy. I believe that the occupation must end. And if it doesn't, it will end Israel. I'm not in favor of settlements. "

" It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present. "

" I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me. "

" We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality. "

" St. Paul was making it impossible to be Jewish and Christian at the same time. What is very striking about those early churches and communities is that you could be both. Under Paul, though, you absolutely couldn't. "

" The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things. "

" The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence. "

" It was the Sephardi Jews who brought fish and chips to Britain, actually, believe it or not, from the Mediterranean world. Apart from actually eating and selling fish and chips, they were kind of debt enforcers. "

" I am somebody who has never been able to give up '60s habits. I am the inevitable old codger on the dance floor. "

" The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism. "

" The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book. "

" I used to have a monthly cookery column, and am a big cook, so that whole sense of connecting what one does with food to one's cultural identity has always been fascinating to me. "

" The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible. "

" Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. "

" In Mesopotamia or Egypt, for example, the monarch had a god-like religious status. But this is not the case in Judaism. So that notion that religion can go on, when all the markers of power and trappings of monarchy disappear, ultimately serves the endurance of Judaism very well. "

" At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn. "