States that have experienced revolutions or have acquired their independence from empires - such as the U.S. or Australia - tend to celebrate their constitutional documents and put them on show in special galleries so that every citizen can become familiar with them. In the U.K., this is not properly done.

Too close and unthinking an allegiance to Washington has sometimes got British governments into trouble.

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

Now, as in the past, rank is closely associated with modes of representation and display: with making an ordered arrangement of people or things visible and evident to onlookers in some fashion.

Monarchs, aristocrats, and other powerful and wealthy individuals have usually been happy to have themselves and their possessions and families immortalised in oil paintings and sculpture. But before the 20th century, such dynasts rarely commissioned artworks that set out to represent society as a whole.

American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.

Both Conservative and Labour politicians in Britain are rather too fond of praising the relative 'classlessness' of American society and of urging their own people to emulate it. There is a certain falseness about such arguments, and also a certain hypocrisy.

Like the proverbial elephant in the room, American anti-Europeanism has loomed large for so long that few trouble to notice it.

Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

Americans like to get rich fast. That this means we go broke fast, too, is something that we have become very good at forgetting. Our ignorance of history is matched only by our unfailing optimism; it's actually part of our optimism.

The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.

The stories about epidemics that are told in the American press - their plots and tropes - date to the nineteen-twenties, when modern research science, science journalism, and science fiction were born.

Epidemics follow patterns because diseases follow patterns. Viruses spread; they reproduce; they die.

Historians once assumed that when childhood mortality was high, people must not have loved their children very much; it would have been too painful. Research has since proved that assumption wrong.

Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.

Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements.

Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.

My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away.

Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.

The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.

My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.