No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.