When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution.

As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.

The British press has an insatiable appetite for making public things that should be private. It's a prurience that I've never understood.

The real point of me isn't that I'm good looking. It's that I'm clever. I've got a brain! I would rather be called a highly intelligent historian than a gorgeous pouting one.

I can't imagine having a conversation about 'Celebrity Big Brother' in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.