The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country.
Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Clearly prize money received more serious attention than scurvy or signals.
Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had n...
The plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each other...
Finished their compulsory training under universal service and were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four were classed as reserves. Upon mobilization the youngest classes filled out the reg...
The daughter is the goddess, separately or together, of Infatuation, Mischief, Delusion and Blind Folly, rendering her victims incapable of rational choice and blind to distinctions of morality and ex...
The cry of Traitor! was not a local voice only, but a bewildered people’s explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of conspiracy, of stab in the back.
The affair made men feel larger than life.
Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the...
Inventive rhetoric is characteristic of true believers.
Have we, he wondered, conceived a merely human project and then imagined it to be a decree of the Almighty?
Germans felt similar emotions. The war was to be, wrote Thomas Mann, a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The victory of Germany will be a victory of soul over numbers. The German soul, he...
William McKinley was a man made to be managed.
What is it about this book—essentially a military history of the first month of the First World War—which gives it its stamp and has created its enormous reputation? Four qualities stand out: a wealth...
Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure.
In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes,
An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves...
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of gov...