Alistair Horne Quotes

The prosperity gap between very rich and very poor in France was less than that between the handful of most affluent grands colons of Algeria and the petit blanc; while between the latter and his Musl...

Following 9/11, intelligence indicated numerous links between al-Qa'eda and Algeria. It began to look as though the roots of jihad could be traced back to the war in Algeria that began 50 years ago.

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Over the past years, I have lectured many times on the Cuban missile crisis, most provocatively to 200 senior officers of the former Soviet army in Moscow in 1991, among them KGB generals. There, my k...

From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the Battle of Algiers, history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a f...

Christmas 1972 was a lonely time for Kissinger, as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginn...

We shall not have the Algerians with us, if they do not want that themselves.... The era of the European administration of the indigenous peoples has run its course.

One of my earliest surprises in Algiers was that in the Casbah, where the highly emotive Battle of Algiers had been waged against Massu’s paras, there is not the smallest plaque or commemoration to in...

Disposal of the inconvenient,

The sun beams down on Algiers — but the inhabitants do not smile back. It is a surly city, harrowed by the stresses of over-population and under-employment; with the architecture of Cannes, but the at...

The moment despair is alone, pure, sure of itself, pitiless in its consequences, it has a merciless power. Albert Camus

The history of France, a permanent miracle, says André Maurois at the end of his Histoire de la France, has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all...

Qu’importe si cent mille coups de fusil partent en Afrique! L’Europe ne les entend pas. Louis-Philippe, 1835

One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!

Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, you reason in the French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria. It was not at all the same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order t...

In this admirable country in which a spring without equal covers it with flowers and its light, men are suffering hunger and demanding justice. Albert Camus, 1958

In real life Boisfeuras had his opposite number in Colonel Antoine Argoud, another para whose extremity in belief and deed were to bring him notoriety later on. We want to halt the decadence of the We...

I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck o...

General Jacques de Bollardière, a distinguished soldier who had fought in Norway, at El Alamein, with the maquis in the Ardennes as well as at Dien Bien Phu, and who was shortly to find himself seriou...

De Gaulle at his iciest had reproached Challe: One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!

Consulting de Gaulle whether he should be present at the flag-lowering ceremony or not, Fouchet after a pause of several seconds had been told simply: Je crois que ça serait inutile....