Evaluation of enemy strength is not an absolute, but a matter of piecing together scraps of reconnaissance and intelligence to form a picture, if possible a picture to fit preconceived theories or to...
Books are ... companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.
When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.
When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all their charges in comm...
What the Ambassador was witnessing—in idea, if not yet in fact—was the transfer of power from its arbitrary exercise by nobles and monarchs to power stationed in a constitution and in representation o...
What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of t...
Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz’s German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual...
Those deterrents—the brotherhood of socialists, the interlocking of finance, commerce, and other economic factors—which had been expected to make war impossible failed to function when the time came....
The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabe...
The origin of war, according to its 14th century codifier Honoré Bonet, lay in Lucifer’s war against God,
TO BE THE SEWER OF CHRISTENDOM and drain all the discords out of it was the primary function of the Crusades,
THE GRANDS BOULEVARDS WERE EMPTY, shop fronts were shuttered, buses, trams, cars, and horse cabs had disappeared. In their place flocks of sheep were herded across the Place de la Concorde on their wa...
SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans, Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June...
Pessimism is a primary source of passivity. As
Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have b...
It was one of the peculiar malfunctions of technology that shore batteries on the islands were generally of inadequate caliber and range to knock out a ship approaching with hostile intent. One is mov...
In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death s...
For a knight to ride in a carriage was against the principles of chivalry and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.
Fear of God is thrown away, lamented Brigitta in Rome, and in its place is a bottomless bag of money. All the Ten Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: Bring hither the money.
The seven liberal arts: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because without number...