Max Hastings on 1914

Grand Admiral Tirpitz employed and English governess for his daughters, who completed their education at Cheltenham Ladies College.

Russia boomed in the last years before Armageddon. After 1917, its new Bolshevik rulers had become the fourth largest in the world, growing at almost ten percent annually. 

Max Hastings on Kaiser Wilhelm

He had no real thirst for blood but a taste for panolpy and posturing, a craving for martial success; he displayed many of the characteristics of a uniformed version of Mr Toad....Most of his contemporaries, including the statesman of Europe, thought him mildly unhinged, and this was probably clinically the case. 

Henry Steele Commager on Gone With The Wind

On Scarlett: She had no mind, but she had a mind of her own; she had no subtlety but she had a genius for getting below the surface of things and knowing their reality; she was full of pretense and wile, but she was impatient of all sham, convention and shibboleth...She was not a lady, though she wanted to be, but a magnificent woman, a vital, proud, passionate creature...sentimental but without nonsense, deeply rooted in the soil of Tara, but uprooted too, and lost. 

Perry Anderson on India

When the British arrived, it was the sprawling heterogeneity of the area that allowed them, after a slow start, to gain such relatively swift and easy control of it...

The British had taken over the subcontinent with such relative ease because it was politically and socially so tangled and fractured, but in imposing a common infrastructural, juridical and cultural grid on it, the unified it as an administrative and ideological reality for the first time in its history. The idea of India was theirs......

But Gandhi’s achievements also came at a huge cost to the cause which he served... For him alone, religion mattered more than politics, which did not coincide with, but subjoined it. There was a further difference. Not only did he hold no religious office, but his religion was to a peculiar extent homemade, unlike any existing belief system at the time...

The composition of Gandhi’s faith, Tidrick has shown, was born of a cross between a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, the planchette and the Esoteric Christian Union. The two were not unconnected, as garbled ideas from the former – karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine – found occult form in the latter. Little acquainted with the Hindu canon itself in his early years, Gandhi reshaped it through the medium of Western spiritualisms of the period....

On religious grounds, it was essential to preserve the division of society into four fundamental castes, for it was this that had saved Hinduism from disintegration....

The threat to Gandhi posed by the prospect of Untouchables gaining the right to their own electorates thus went much deeper than fear of another British device to divide the national movement, like the separate rolls granted to Muslims, real though this was. More fundamental questions were at issue. If Untouchables were to be treated as external to the Hindu community, it would be confirmation that caste was indeed, as its critics had always maintained, a vile system of discrimination, relegating the lowest orders of society to a subhuman existence with which the smallest brush was pollution, and since Hinduism was founded on caste, it would stand condemned with caste. To reclaim the Untouchables for Hinduism was an ideological imperative for the reputation of the religion itself. But it was also politically vital, since if they were subtracted from the Hindu bloc in India, its predominance over the Muslim community would be weakened....

To cut off these dangers, Gandhi – still in prison – announced...he would fast to death until the award was rescinded and Untouchables were bundled back into the Hindu electorate....under colossal public pressure, and physical threats to him and his community if he stood firm, Ambedkar yielded to Gandhi’s blackmail.

Satyagraha had not been a success: each time Gandhi had tried it, the British had seen it off. His great achievement lay elsewhere, in the creation of a nationalist party, whose road to power forked away in another direction. For in the end independence did not come from passive resistance, let alone sexual abstinence, individual or universal. It was the result of two other dynamics. The first was the broadening of the electoral machinery first introduced by the British in 1909, and expanded in 1919.....

Kwasi Kwarteng on the British Empire from The Economist

In Sudan, a notably snobbish spot, one-third of all colonial political officers were the sons of clergymen and half of those recruited between 1902 and 1914 had a “Blue” (a sporting distinction) from Oxford or Cambridge, leading to the quip that Sudan was a land of “Blacks ruled by Blues”. In the 1930s, only officials able to play polo could hope for advancement in the Sudanese province of Darfur: in the same period, Darfur had just one primary school. In 1916, Mr Kwarteng notes, David Lloyd George, the humble son of a Welsh Baptist minister, could become Britain’s prime minister, but would have stood no chance of being governor of colonial Nigeria.

Keynes on Lloyd-George at Versailles

"How can I convey any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this siren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?....that flavour of purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power."

Beatrice Webb on David Lloyd-George

"He is a blatant intriguer - and every word he says is of the nature of an offer "to do a deal". He neither likes nor dislikes you; you are a mere instrument, one among many - sometimes of value, sometimes not worth picking up."

Adam Kirsch on Engels

Many of Engels' lurid details and damning statistics come from official reports like Edwin Chadwick's "Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain", which was commissioned by a Whig government and published under a Tory one. Indeed, while Engels insists that the workers cannot hope for redress from a bourgeois-aristocratic Parliament, he can't help but note that "although the middle classes at the moment are the main - indeed the only - power in Parliament, nevertheless the last session (1844) was in effect a continuous debate on working-class conditions. All this suggests that fare from being obdurate, England's ruling class were taking action - slowly and as yet inadequately - to solve the problems caused by the industrial revolution. These problems were, it is useful to remember, totally unprecedented, not just in English but in human history. The sudden eruption of vast polluted slums in the North of England baffled both the institutions of government and the prevailing theories of economics and society.

Hilary Mantel on Keith Thomas' The Ends of Life

Warfare was an aristocratic business, and young men trained for nothing else: then along came firearms, which made any low-class fool into a killing machine.

Mark Greiff on Mad Men

It’s a commonplace that portrayal of the past can be used to criticise the present. What of those cases in which criticism of the past is used to congratulate the present? I suppose it does at least expose what’s most pompous and self-regarding in our own time: namely, an unearned pride in our supposed superiority when it comes to health and restraint, the condition of women, and the toleration of (some) difference in ethnicity and sexuality. Mad Men flatters us where we deserve to be scourged. As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society – ‘Look, they used to burn their witches!’ – while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we’ve managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years’ time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised.

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.

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.

On Catherine the Great

Catherine's era exulted in artistic magnificence as international intercourse (in every sense of the word). But it also presented a brutal spectacle of government as organised crime.

Julian Barnes on Dreyfus

Charles Peguy said the Dreyfus Case confirmed the rule that the victim usually isn't up to the mystique of his own affair. "We were willing to die for Dreyfus," he commented, "but Dreyfus wasn't."

Herzon on History

History has no libretto and this is difficult especially when there is no libretto. And if there were a libretto, then history would be unnecessary. And then it would be a practical joke.