On judging the past

Well sure, I mean, if you’re going to make moral judgments of people, you’ve got, it seems to me, to take some view of their conditions – what they thought they were doing. And recognise that the times change, that moral attitudes are different.

Although Lord knows if you look at modern wars going on, I don’t think the crusaders come off looking so bad. I mean the ISIS folks seem to be quite beyond the pale. And certainly World War II was a bloody mess. And the Holocaust happened. So we shouldn’t get too superior in our views of medieval people.