"Dostoevsky must have known that the Jesus of the New Testament rejects the Inquisitor’s own sharp distinction between earthly and heavenly bread. Salvation for Matthew’s gospel is not a “religious” or ethereal affair; it is a matter of feeding the hungry and visiting the sick. In true Judaic spirit, the teaching is ethical to core. It is the materialistically minded who like their religion to be otherworldly, in compensation for their own this-worldly crassness. It is not surprising that a material girl like Madonna should be attending classes on mysticism at the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles. How else can she escape for a moment from her agents, minders, managers, hair stylists, and the rest? Surely salvation cannot lie in anything as prosaic as a cup of water and a crust of bread. The Grand Inquisitor is a thoroughly worldly type, objecting to what he sees as cruelly unrealistic spiritual demands. What he does not see is that God is a unique kind of superego, one who loves and accepts failure rather than simply rewarding success. Nothing could be more worldly wise than that."

"History does not just have to be an adjunct to an all-round education, centered on the evidence. It can be centered on the reader – while still maintaining an intellectual rigor – to the benefit of historians and their students as well as the readers. It raises new areas of debate that have meaning within, as well as outside, the profession. Ultimately it allows us to address the question of how Mankind has changed, or stayed the same, over the course of six or seven hundred years. This is surely the Philosopher’s Stone of historians, for history is not about the past per se but about understanding humanity over time. My own vision is that, through such literary methods, serious history can be melded with imaginative literary methods, and can rise above the tedious and repetitive aspects of education as surely and inspiringly as a violin soloist can rise above the hours of practice and theory in the academy."