“We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.”

“And this is the most provocative situation, is it not? It invites abuse, manipulation, tyranny, subjection. A person is supposed to accommodate herself--himself--absolutely to another person...”

“It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.”

“In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.”

“In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.”

“The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but...”

“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,' 'Claudia, you must not answer back like that.' Argument,...”

“How many men have asked you to marry them?' 'Not a lot. Most had too strong an instinct for self-preservation.”

“For some of us a war was being fought; there must have been many who had no idea what this war was, whose it was or why it was. Like some theatrical lion it roared off-stage while the actors...”