George VI in the conventional parlance was a Good King who sacrificed his life to his sense of duty. If we are to have monarchs it would be hard to find a better one.

Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.

If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

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.

The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.