Perfect soldier, perfect gentleman never gave offence to anyone not even the enemy.

Fascism was little more than terrorist rule by corrupt gangsters. Mussolini was not corrupt himself but he did nothing except to rage impotently.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment and nothing more corrupting.