The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King...
The death of the last of the three brothers in 1328 left the succession to the crown open, with results that led to the longest war—so far—in Western history. Three claimants were available—a grandson...
The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate b...
The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on...
The German obsession had two parts: that Belgian resistance was illegal and that it was organized from above by the Belgian government or by burgomasters, priests, and other persons who could be class...
Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.
One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the cost of imp...
NO PEACE TREATY WAS REACHED at Bruges because the English were determined to retain their former possessions in France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was equally determined to regain the...
Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis in 1324 was a forthright assertion of the supremacy of the state.
Major von Kleist gave orders that a man or, if no man was available, a woman, be taken from every household as a hostage. Through some peculiar failure of the system, the greater the terror, the more...
It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.
History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of aff...
Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.
Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodo...
But to settle the Eastern Question was beyond even Disraeli’s power—beyond, it seems, any human power, for it still haunts the world today.
Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been seduced by that liar, the Devil, and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres wer...
As the final crisis boiled, his marginalia on telegrams grew more and more agitated: Aha! the common cheat, Rot! He lies! Mr. Grey is a false dog, Twaddle! The rascal is crazy or an idiot! When Russia...
Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.
Had said, The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire.
William III died childless in 1702, in a fall when his horse stumbled over a molehill, an obstacle that seems as if it should have some philosophical significance but, as far as can be seen, does not.