This is what historians usually do, quibble about cause and effect when the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world. Thomas Paine and Ben Franklin, for instance. Bismark. Lenin.
I'm not suggesting that every moment in the match has to be huge, but you've got to space it out to have a couple of really outstanding moments.
A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
There are many defining moments in my journey.
I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'
We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.
Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.
Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.
Certainly in terms of my life - anybody's life - you go through death, childbirth and marriage, glory and defeat, and so on.
I have been around at a time when important things needed to be done.
It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.
No less than war or statecraft, the history of Economics has its heroic ages.
If I didn't have a front-row seat on history, it was at least a seat on the aisle.
Hillary Clinton told the FBI 39 times she couldn't remember anything. I couldn't remember, I couldn't remember. Or recall key events concerning illegal server and related misconduct.
