“The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.”

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor

Growing inequality is a huge problem, and of course is intimately connected to xenophobia and racism.

One of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game.

To bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today’s globe.

It’s tempting to want to blame it all on an easily identifiable target: Muslims, immigrants, refugees, blacks, Jews.

All of us living in today’s world are facing an enormous crisis – arguably the greatest that humanity has ever faced

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?

Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.

Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.

In the form of man-made global warming; one can’t be neutral at such a moment. It’s like claiming to be neutral if you’re living in Germany in 1933.

The Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground.

No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.

Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

No matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .

I said to him, “State your business, mortal!” There was no need for me to call him “mortal” or to speak like a sixteenth-century knight. It just sounded cool.

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures.

As the 20th Century developed, not surprisingly people left the church and I can see the church’s role in losing people.

I’d really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it’s the wrong century.

The nationalism and the protectionism that was built into the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and that characterized the Mexican attitude to the United States for much of the 20th century were difficult to overcome. But that actually has occurred. And the cooperation.

If we remain determined to shape a new and better world of separate, sovereign nations, this new century will be a happier one.

As a result of the U.S.-Mexico War in the 19th century, and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, half of what was Mexico was severed and became much of the western part of the United States.