Quotes from Andrew Roberts

Yet Hardenberg was kept on in secret government service by King Frederick William and his fiercely anti-Napoleonic wife, the beautiful and independent-minded Queen Louise, daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg, not least in order to keep diplomatic channels open to Russia.

After Hitler had viewed the granite memorial to the 1918 Armistice near the railway carriage, he ordered it to be destroyed. Spears was right to think that the French initially had 'a conception of the old days of royalty when you just exchanged a couple of provinces, paid a certain amount of millions and then called it a day and started off the next time hoping you would be more lucky', but they were soon to be vigorously disabused.

He adored the boy, who could induce strange reflections in him; once when the infant fell and slightly hurt himself, causing a great commotion, 'the Emperor became very pensive and then said: "I've seen one cannonball take out a single line of twenty men.

Though he was eighteen months younger than Joseph, Napoleon was always stronger-willed.)

political talent is the least hereditary of our tendencies'.

Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer, capable of synthesizing vast amounts of material and rendering it in clear, elegant prose.

The breadth of Churchill's hinterland – his many and varied interests beyond politics – meant that he could regard politics with more detachment than most professional politicians, and thus not make the compromises others did in order to gain, or remain in, office.

On Liberty, 'that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

Cuando uno comete un gran error», reflexionaría filosóficamente, «es muy fácil que acabe revelándose de mayor utilidad que la más acertada de las decisiones. La vida es un todo indivisible, y la suerte también, y ninguno de sus componentes puede separarse del resto».

The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.

In both parties there are fools at one end and crackpots at the other,' he said, 'but the great body in the middle is sound and wise.'70

It was a measure of Napoleon's resilience and resourcefulness – and of the confidence that he still commanded – that having returned from Russia with only 10,000 effectives from his central invading force, he was able within four months to field an army of 151,000 men for the Elbe campaign, with many more to come.

there could hardly have been very good Anglo-French relations after 3 July 1940, when Churchill permitted the Royal Navy to bombard the Vichy fleet at Oran in Algeria, in order to try to prevent it sailing for French ports and thence possible incorporation into the Kriegsmarine.

Remember Binasco; it brought me tranquillity in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands. Nothing is more salutary than appropriately severe examples.'78 'If you make war,' he would say to General d'Hédouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.

If we are together nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail.

The calm sea was the miracle of Dunkirk.

I could have defended the British Empire against anyone,' he told an aide later on, 'except the British people.

Placing oneself in the limelight while seeming modestly to edge away from it is one of the most skilful of all political moves, and Napoleon had mastered it perfectly.

but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war', wrote the Irish literary essayist Robert Wilson Lynd, 'appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

sensed that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success, and if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing.' Napoleon on the Waterloo campaign

The Jabberwocky': 'Calloo! Callay! O frabjous day! And so he chortled in his joy.

When excited by any violent passion his face assumed a … terrible expression … his eyes flashed fire; his nostrils dilated, swollen with the inner storm … He seemed to be able to control at will these explosions, which, by the way, as time went on, became less and less frequent. His head remained cool … When in good humour, or when anxious to please, his expression was sweet and caressing, and his face was lighted up by a most beautiful smile.38

The deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 of 4,000 Jewish children aged twelve and younger, after being forcibly separated from their parents at the Vélodrome and starved for a week, was done not by the Gestapo or the SS but by ordinary Parisian gendarmes acting under orders from French officials.