About 40 years ago I drove off an embankment and tumbled down a huge hill. I was standing in the field with my car smashed like a can, saying, “Am I dead?” because I had seen myself dead in the car. Then someone said, “Are you OK?” and I didn’t have a scratch. I believe it was an angel experience.

Have you seen my documentaries?

When I had a bicycle accident when I was 24. I was on a bridge going down; the bicycle broke and I smashed to the ground, face first. I broke my jaw and my teeth, and had to have plastic surgery. It all took half a year and then, funnily enough, I got my first big job – a TV series – with what I thought of then as this big, ugly scar.

An emergency landing in a snow storm in Philadelphia.

I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.

On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.

When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.

When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.

That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.

Now. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations to reality better than when I was 20 or 10.