I wouldn’t change anything. Life is what it is, you just have to get on with it.

My mentally ill brother going to juvenile hall when he was 14. It led to his incarceration from 14 to almost 40.

I wish I hadn’t been a heavy smoker for so many years.

I would have spent more time with my parents. I did see them often, but you don’t realise how much you’ll miss someone or something until it’s gone.

I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.