William Caxton (1484)

Great thanks, laud and honour ought to be given unto the clerks, poets and historiographs that have written many noble books of wisedom of the lives, passions, and miracles of holy saints, of histories of noble and famous acts and faites, and of the chronicles since the beginning of the creation of the world unto this present time, by which we be daily informed and have knowledge of many things of whom we should not have known if they had not left to us their monuments written.

Chaplin of Fairbanks and Pickford...

"If you will read the story of Peter Pan and Wendy, you will know a great deal more about Mary and Doug than you do know."

Zadie Smith on Speaking in Tongues

"Voice adaptation is still the original British sin....We feel that our voices are who we are and that to have more than one, or to use different voices for different occasions, represents at best a Janus-faced duplicity and at a worst the loss of our very souls.

"Obama can do young Jewish male, old lady from the South Side, white woman from Kansas, Kenyan elders, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards, bank tellers....Obama had the audacity to suggest that even if you can't see it stamped on their faces most people...have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives. 

"The single-voiced Obamanation crowd. They have a great fear of what they see as Obama's doubling ways. These are fears that have their roots in an anxiety about voice. When he talks to us he sure sounds like us - but behind our backs we're still clinging to our religion and our guns. Right up to the wire, Obama made many black men and women of Jackson's generation suspicious. How can the man who passes between culturally black and white voices with such flexibility, with such ease, be an honest man?

"For reasons that are obscure to me, those qualities we cherish in our artists we condemn in our politicians. In our artists, we look for the many-coloured voice, the multiple sensibility. From our politicians though, we still look for ideological heroism, despite everything. We consider pragmatists to be weak....To me, this is a doleful conclusion. It is exactly men with such intellectual peculiarities that I have always hoped to see in politics. The voice that speaks with such freedom, thus unburdened by dogma and personal bias, thus flooded with empathy, might make a good president."

Max Hastings on the RIMH Potstdam's Germany and The Second World War

"The authors perceive a reality which still escapes many Germans: most of those who joined the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler did so not because they recognised that he was evil, but because they were dismayed that he was losing the war: "Not all the conspirators were equally quick to see that the whole of the war conducted by the Wehrmacht was serving criminal ends."

"The Allies were delighted by the July plot, as clear evidence of fissures inside the German war machine. But they were also relieved by its failure. The prospect of having to negotiate with an army clique willing to make peace would open up all manner of ghastly difficulties with Stalin, while raising the American and British publics who would surely be tempted by a chance of ending the carnage.