Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

The way history is currently taught in schools, jumping from Hitler to the Henrys, is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode four before you have episode one. The sense of going on a journey, of chronology and continuity, is incredibly important to the imagination.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.