In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given them the power to challenge constituted authority. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by product of revolution, it was the source of energy.

In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.