My PhD thesis just passed with no corrections!! I'm seldom overcome, but today I might just be.

We need to develop a fraction of this energy as academics with our publications.

The beauty the ancients sought is here.

Are you proud of your generation?

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Today I ate dates that came from a palm that had grown in the same garden in Medina owned by a companion of Muhammad. We routinely touch history now in ways our ancestors would not have dreamed.

I must be pretty slow because I still don’t understand the business model of making every academic book two hundred quid to buy.

I love how we are now all starting to realise that absolutely everything in public debate and policy for the past twenty years has been utter and irredeemable nonsense.

We should be much more alarmed at the amount of people whose argument actually comes down to claiming that the truth doesn’t matter anyway. The painful apathy of our time has gone largely unnoticed.

If a person dies through violence it is a tragedy no matter what ethnicity that person happens to be. If a beautiful, historic building is destroyed it is a tragedy no matter which country it stood in. When did everyone forget that?

Love one another.

We have such a beautiful world. It is by nature a shared world. We should all be working together to protect it and each other.

Yes, I am and yes, I am. We should all stop burning the world down.

I don't like when beautiful buildings burn down; when irreplaceable paintings have things thrown at them or are knifed; when sculptures that have stood centuries are smashed on the ground; or when people are killed for the ideas in their heads. Simple really.

Very sad watching several cities in France and Italy burning tonight. Surely we must all long by now for human beings to grow into our maturity.

Don't shorten the time it takes you to read. It is possible that the ideas you are having while reading are at least as valuable as the words on the page.

In the time to come we will all have to fight very hard to be intentional.

Only in London is the graffiti in Latin.