Quotes from Andrew Roberts

Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.

Hitler had done quite enough in his career to prove how utterly untrustworthy he was long before the Nazi–Soviet Pact was signed in August 1939, yet as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out: 'Not to trust anybody was very typical of Josef Stalin. All the years of his life did he trust one man only, and that was Adolf Hitler.

What is now clear', wrote Leslie Rowan a quarter of a century later, 'is that Greece would not have been a free country had it not been for Churchill's courage and grasp of the essential.

Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.

and said that these councils were only ever resorted to as 'a cowardly proceeding' intended to distribute blame.

I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.

I realized there was no freedom without funds.

In 1765, four years before Napoleon's birth, the Scottish lawyer and man of letters James Boswell visited the island and was enchanted with what he found. 'Ajaccio is the prettiest town in Corsica,' he later wrote. 'It

He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, "Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.

The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.

Ahron Cohen, who, despite attending Ahmadinejad's Holocaust Denial conference, in fact does not only not deny that it happened, but actually blames Jewry for it, saying: 'There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.

It is sheer laziness not compressing thought into a reasonable space

Historians still debate how many people perished during the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in late 1947: most estimate more than half a million but some think twice that, and at least sixteen million were permanently displaced.

one of the most important I ever wrote', asking for arms to be lent or leased to Britain under a programme whereby Britain would repay the United States over the very long term.153 (Even he would probably not have guessed that the final instalment of the loan, of $83.25 million, would only be repaid in 2006.)

Let them abandon the utter fallacy,' he said, 'the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality upon the efforts of all the different forms and different classes of human enterprise, they will increase the well-being of the world.

Hitler and his Nazi gang have sown the wind; let them reap the whirlwind.

ad hominem attack

Many people say I ought to have retired after the war, and have become some sort of elder statesman, but how could I? I have fought all my life and cannot give up fighting now!

In the past, Churchill had described an Irish Parliament in Dublin as 'dangerous and impracticable', but with the Irish Nationalists now holding the balance of power he had completely come around to supporting it, as his speech at the football ground showed, although he did believe that the Ulstermen needed 'a moratorium of several years before they had to join'.

Churchill's prescience about Communism had mirrored what he had said about Nazism, but this time he was able to halt the appeasement that might otherwise have once again become the West's default mechanism.

To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.'71

It is said that most first novels are at least partly autobiographical

Churchill sustituyó la religión ortodoxa por una fe laica en el progreso histórico, con un marcado énfasis en la misión civilizadora de Inglaterra y el imperio británico».

A country like my own, Britain – which still occupies Gilbraltar captured in the 18th century, the Falklands captured in the 19th century and the Channel Islands which belonged to France until 1468, and rightly so in each case – is being absurdly hypocritical when it criticises Israel for retaining territory vital to her survival, which Gilbraltar, the Falklands and the Channel Island certainly aren't to Britain's.