Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.
Where Brooke was embracing cleanness and nobleness, Mann saw a more positive goal. Germans being, he said, the most educated, law-abiding, peace-loving of all peoples, deserved to be the most powerful...
When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.
To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.
Though writing in 1917, Mann was reflecting 1914, the year that was to be the German 1789, the establishment of the German idea in history, the enthronement of Kultur, the fulfillment of Germany’s his...
These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many...
There is no record what Asquith replied or what, in his inmost mind, a region difficult to penetrate under the best of circumstances, he thought on this crucial question.
The reckoning of time was based on the movements of sun and stars, nature’s timekeepers, which were familar and carefully observed.
The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never...
The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke’s plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson’s nor Lanrezac alter Joffre’s.
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had...
Regulations, he would say, are all very well for drill but in the hour of danger they are no more use.… You have to learn to think. To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the impon...
Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343, the...
In this atmosphere of doubt why was the extreme risk approved? Partly because exasperation at the failure of all her efforts at intimidation had led to an all-or-nothing state of mind and a helpless y...
In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies.
Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visit...
For a hundred years the Ottoman Empire, called the Sick Man of Europe, had been considered moribund by the hovering European powers who were waiting to fall upon the carcass.
Charles’s old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles V to support Clement, preferred to maintain neutrality, saying th...
Belgium’s declared intention to fight was, the Germans believed, no more than the rage of dreaming sheep—in the words a Prussian statesman once applied to his domestic opponents.
The blood libel took possession of the popular mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too had originated in the 12th century.