Quotes from Andrew Roberts

Raging rivers, bottomless mud and bitter cold', wrote a contemporary commentator, 'completed the destruction of an Italian offensive that was politically inept and militarily under-prepared.

The next month Mussolini and Hitler signed a ten-year alliance, known as the Pact of Steel.

Wellington was even harsher, calling Lowe 'a very bad choice; he was a man wanting in education and judgment. He was a stupid man, he knew nothing at all of the world, and like all men who knew nothing of the world, he was suspicious and jealous.

It was a few minutes before the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,' Churchill later wrote of the moment the Great War ended.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,' George Bernard Shaw wrote in 'The Revolutionist's Handbook'; 'the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

My own experience of the First World War, and my readings in history,' he was later to write, 'had convinced me that the Prime Minister should be a man who knew what war meant, in terms of the personal suffering of the man in the line, in terms of high strategy, and in terms of that crucial issue – how the generals got on with their civilian bosses.

As soon as the war ended, Churchill immediately set about writing The World Crisis. It was to be packed with lessons for the future. 'No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion,' he wrote. 'No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.

Napoleon's crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested.

The public trusted him in 1940 not because they believed he had always, or even generally, been right – all too clearly he had not – but because they knew he had fought bravely for what he believed in, while many other, more self-serving politicians had not.

la vida de todo hombre se dirime en la encrucijada del Pensamiento o la Acción».

we could all die without regretting life.'35

Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest.

Hitler's treatment of the Austrian President Kurt von Schuschnigg, the Czech President Emil Hácha and the British and French leaders had been characterized by hucksterism, bullying and constant piling on of pressure, to which they had responded with a combination of gullibility, appeasement and weary resignation. Yet with his lifelong enemies the Bolsheviks, Hitler was attentive and respectful, though of course no less duplicitous. Their time would come.

The ideal of Liberty that has made the Republic the arbiter of Europe will also make it the arbiter of distant oceans, of faraway countries.

Let us reconcile ourselves to the mysterious rhythm of our destinies, such as they must be in this world of space and time. Let us treasure our joys but not bewail our sorrows. The glory of light cannot exist without its shadows. Life is a whole, and good and ill must be accepted together. The journey has been enjoyable and well worth making. Once.

Churchill created the Royal Naval Air Service, which had fifty planes by 1914, and pioneered the concept of aerial bombing of Zeppelin airship aerodromes and German lines of communication. The first successful launch of a plane off the deck of a battleship took place in January 1912, and some military historians see Churchill as the father of the modern aircraft carrier.

It seems extraordinary, but even on the eve of D-Day, four years after de Gaulle had set up the Free French in London, the leaders of both Britain and the United States felt such distrust of him. But they detested his French chauvinism and genuinely feared that he might try to turn France into an anti-Western Gaullist dictatorship after the war.

Los hombres que han cambiado el mundo nunca han triunfado por ganarse a los poderosos, sino por agitar a las masas. El primer método es fruto de las intrigas, y solo ofrece un resultado limitado. El segundo es el recorrido del genio, y cambia el rostro del mundo. Napoleón en Santa Helena

Another effect of the heavy rainfall of the night of 17–18 June that worked against Napoleon was the way that it softened the ground, to the extent that cannonballs tended to plough into the mud, rather than bounce along hardened ground. A cannonball fired at sun-baked ground might bounce as many as five or six times, leaving death and carnage in its wake, while one that merely buried itself after its initial impact had only a fraction of that lethal capacity.

No voice, no brains; just break up a meeting that they have not the wit to address. The electors will know how to deal with a party whose only weapon is idiotic clamour.'143

take it.' London could take anything. My heart goes

I wanted learning and I wanted funds. I wanted freedom. I realized there was no freedom without funds. I had to make money to get essential independence;

an old woman say 'You see, he really cares: he's crying.

for only with independence can you let your own life express itself naturally. To be tied down to someone else's routine, doing things you dislike Ã¢â'¬â€œ that is not life Ã¢â'¬â€œ not for me .