Can you remember why you did a PhD?

There were two main reasons. The first was that I really enjoyed research and I enjoyed turning my understanding of events and trends into narratives and analyses that were accessible to other people, that perhaps rings hollow given how many people have called up my thesis in the library which probably could be counted on the fingers of one finger – but that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to understand things that had not previously been understood, for myself, but also make them understandable to a wider community. So that's the noble reason and the more prosaic reason is that friends, key friends were staying on at university to do research and that made it much more attractive.