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“... Are you a satisfied man?’ ‘I am certainly not that,’ replies Simon Schama. But he is the opposite of a revolutionary. Even when he complains, his criticisms are carefully padded, as though in boxing-gloves, so that they do not hurt. Perhaps these days no one can admit to being satisfied. On the other hand, he is the Mellon Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard and he has just published a work of fiction ...”

“... I have just published a work of fiction, Happiness.* I did not plan this voyage of the imagination in my spare time, as a jaunt to distract me from more serious labours. It is the culmination of all I have done and written. I could not go on accumulating learning for ever: I would never have enough. So I have spent most of the years since my last book thinking: I withdrew into long periods of silence ...”

“... Shortly before his death, I talked to Braudel about the motives that lay behind his final book, The Identity of France. He had made his reputation as a universal historian, with a global curiosity. Why should he seek to crown his achievement in such a parochial fashion, proclaiming that it was France, after all, that he really loved? ‘I am a Frenchman, just like any other,’ he said ...”

“... Many years ago, in the course of the oral examination of my doctoral degree, a criticism was made of my thesis. ‘You have not mentioned the Programme of Nancy,’ said the illustrious professor. I replied: ‘What is the Programme of Nancy?’ Embarrassed, he confessed he did not know. He turned to the other examiner, who also did not know. Were they frauds? I have always felt that history has been both unjust and too kind to the Don’t Knows ...”

“... Why does every home not have a whole wall of encyclopedias, now that we supposedly live in the Information Age? Why have they failed to establish themselves as indispensable items of furniture, against the competition of electronic gadgetry? Because they are contenting themselves with just giving information, instead of sharpening it, so that it points somewhere ...”

“... Modern imaginative literature has two favourite themes: love and crime. Most people accept that love is a mystery full of twists and surprises that are not predictable by science or reason. It is natural that its infinite variations should be probed most interestingly by novelists rather than by experts and statisticians: no one has dared set up a Chair of Amorology ...”

“... And in France, almost one in every six families has access to an actual résidence seeondaire. As Theodore Zeldin puts it, ‘a Frenchman’s second home is his castle.’ The quip is characteristic of Dr Zeldin’s brisk and knowledgeable canter round the characteristics of ‘the French’. His starting-point is ...”

“... Plath’s Bell Jar, to publish the work (at least initially) under a pseudonym. The review copy of Theodore Zeldin’s first novel is accompanied by a separately-printed 2,000-word statement by the author, entitled ‘How I came to write Happiness’. This preface is evidently for the eyes of the reviewer only. It is, I think, a pity that ...”

“... the highest beauty and thus – something of the sort was suggested in a few bare sentences by Theodore Zeldin in the second volume of France 1848-1945 – some fashion becomes a substitute for beauty. Fashion often imposes a hideous artificiality, on men and women alike, dragging even the most beautiful down to an unbecoming common denominator. This ...”

“... and dwelling on the contradictions and complexities that make generalisation hazardous, as Theodore Zeldin was to do in his magisterial history of France, Tuchman wavered uncertainly between a vision of the period as comfortable and secure and a countervision that sees it wracked by anxieties and fears. Apparently, it never occurred to her that ...”

“... The logic of this change has recently been taken to its conclusion by at least one historian, Theodore Zeldin. A tart critic of Braudel’s enterprise in the pages of the London Review of Books, his own study of The French disavows any notion of national or individual coherence at all, on the grounds that people are becoming more different from ...”

“... It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a parodic exhibition of French images of Anglicity, as so many historiographic Major ...”