Quotes from Margaret MacMillan

IF YOU BELIEVE THE DOCTORS," Salisbury once remarked, "nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.

The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany.

In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.

Part of Nietzsche's appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives and, later, the Nazis did. Sadly, Nietzsche was not available to explain himself; he went mad in 1889 and died in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition.

Poincaré, unusually for his time and class, was a feminist and a strong supporter of animal rights, refusing, for example, to join the customary hunting parties at the presidential country estate.

The anarchist who finished his meal in a Paris café and then calmly murdered a fellow diner said merely, "I shall not be striking an innocent if I strike the first bourgeois that I meet.

He told conductors how to conduct and painters how to paint. As Edward said unkindly, he was "the most brilliant failure in history."33

Louvain was a dull place, said a guidebook in 1910, but when the time came it made a spectacular fire.

But the superiority of the British is that it is a matter of complete indifference to them if they appear to be stupid.

Anyone who falls into your hands falls to your sword!

disarmament was an idea just of Jews, Socialists, and hysterical women

Nationalist movements often overlapped with economic and class issues: Rumanian and Ruthenian peasants, for example, challenged their Hungarian and Polish landlords.

The French would do whatever it took to get Britain to commit itself. In 1909 they produced a carefully faked document, said to have been discovered when a French commercial traveler picked up the wrong bag on a train, which purported to show Germany's invasion plans for Britain.