Quotes from G.J. Meyer

People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.

Added to all this was the emergence of a new set of social values—call it the Protestant ethic—that encouraged the prosperous to equate wealth with virtue and to regard the destitute as responsible for (even predestined to) their predicament.

It matters also that both Henry and his daughter Elizabeth were not just rulers but consummate performers, masters of political propaganda and political theater. They

Ordinaries, that church law was above the reach of the secular authorities. He was now an outsider, still officially secretary

The deletion of an apostrophe and a single letter turned "Jane's" into "Jane," and the words "and her" were inserted immediately thereafter. Now the crown was to pass not to the male heirs of Jane Grey but to "the Lady Jane and her heirs masles." (Edward was of course highly literate, but spelling was a kind of free-form creative art in the sixteenth century

Unprovable stories about her sexual encounters with a horse have come down to the twenty-first century.

Salt was expensive, however, and so was used only with varieties of fish and meat that had demonstrated a capacity for surviving the preservation process in a reasonably appetizing state and were therefore regarded as "worth their salt.

from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the careers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was England's most published author.

But of course he was also human, which is to say he was limited, and among his limitations was a blindness of a kind that is perhaps not all that unusual among extraordinary men of a certain type. Often right about important things, he was inclined to think himself always right about everything.

Europe's leading humanist and scriptural scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam

It takes some effort to grasp just how small the American government and its military were before the Great War. Fewer than twenty officers served on the Army General Staff in Washington. The planning staff was only half that size. And yet the War Department, together with the Post Office, accounted for well over half of the federal payroll.)

Don Pedro Luis de Borja-Pierluigi Borgia to the Italians—was still in his mid-twenties when he became the first member of his family to be the most hated man in Rome. He did so not by behaving badly in any way of which a credible record has survived, but by carrying out an assignment that made him the enemy of some of the most badly behaved Romans of his time.

Even the rank and file were career soldiers for the most part, volunteers drawn mainly from Britain's urban poor and working classes, more loyal to their regiments and to one another than to any sentimental notions of imperial glory, and ready to make a joke of anything.

Erasmus argued that the father of the Reformation was wrong—that man does have free will.

Almost everything they heard and read assured them that their glorious armies would soon be victorious, that their cause was a noble one, and that the enemy was wicked in ways rarely seen in history.

The troops were cracking because they could not absorb what was happening to them, because they knew themselves to be utterly powerless (bravery had little survival value when one was on the receiving end of a bombardment), and because they had no confidence that the generals who had put them in danger knew what they were doing. Men whose courage was beyond challenge could and did break down if subjected to enough strain of this kind.

Angrily, even tearfully, he complained of the divisions within the clergy, where "some be too stiff in their old Mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their new Sumpsimus.

In fact, however, Calvin regarded predestination as logically inescapable but otherwise beyond human understanding and in practical terms not of great importance.

The accepted version of his life story provides the world with something it apparently needs: the perfect example of papal decadence.

The dark legend of the Borgias, having taken root in Italy, found a wider audience when religious reformers went forth in search of evidence not just that non-Italian popes were a bad idea but that the papacy was an evil institution, illegitimate, and inherently corrupt.

responsibilities but to securing the