Quotes from Max Hastings

That summer, Egyptian army officers eagerly anticipated their liberation by Rommel's Afrika Korps. They were thrilled by the arrival in Cairo of two German spies, Hans Eppler and another man known only as "Sandy." Captain Sadat was crestfallen, however, to witness the frivolous behaviour of the two agents, whom he found living on the Nile houseboat of the famous belly dancer Hikmet Fahmy.

David Rees' Korea: The Limited War

It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants.

Fear not the result, for either thy end be a majestic and an enviable one, or God shall perpetuate thy reign upon the waters.

The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India." Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill's ravings:

All active-minded men the world over are boys at heart, be they generals or privates, and there are few things more stimulating or conducive to high morale and self-confidence than the knowledge that you have been chosen to do something about which others know nothing and which calls for a high standard of efficiency, integrity and courage. Basically, I suppose, it is conceit – a buccaneer complex.

whom one would care to share a desert island. My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.

The archbishop of Canterbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: "We must avoid praying each other down.

Some Americans responded brutally to such docility: in two separate incidents on 14 July, an officer and an NCO of the U.S. 45th Division murdered large groups of Italians in cold blood. One, Sgt. Horace West, who killed thirty-seven with a Thompson submachine gun, was convicted by a court-martial, but later granted clemency. The other, Capt. John Compton, assembled a firing squad which massacred thirty-six Italian prisoners.

War is full of clichés, because only clichés can match the drama of the moment.

Horace Walpole wrote in the mid-eighteenth century: 'No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.

but human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge.

Beveridge Report, published in November 1942, which laid the foundations of Britain's postwar welfare state.

Washington displayed a remarkable indifference to the political future of the eastern battlefields until it was too late.

a nation of superior, unfriendly, discourteous people, set in the old ways of inefficiency, clinging to old dreams of a greatness which we cannot perpetuate…We deceive ourselves if we think the soil is clean. The seeds of distrust and dislike lie dormant in it.

though a pilot once panicked and baled out over Germany, leaving the rest of his crew to bring the plane home.

While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees as a result of industrial accidents.

His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilize Britain's warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British nation faced the world united and exalted. The "Dunkirk spirit" was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political political leadership for the rest of time.

It is known that 610,000 ethnic Germans were killed in Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Everywhere in Asia life is infused with a few terrible certainties—hunger, indignity, and violence." This was the world Americans perceived themselves advancing to save, not merely from the Japanese, but from imperialists of every hue—including their closest allies, the British.

Nimitz remarked that when he sent Spruance out with the fleet, "he was always sure286 he would bring it home; when he sent Halsey out, he did not know precisely what was going to happen." Halsey's boldness was in doubt seldom, his judgement and intellect often.

The damage to their prestige and confidence would have been immense, and Churchill might not have survived as prime minister through 1941.

How can the heart accept the signals of the brain, however powerful and rational, that a known universe, in which the blotter stands where it has always stood on the office desk, the sofa in the lounge of the house, the shop on the corner of the street, is about to disappear for ever?

On 4 January 1875 he filed his first Times despatch, with the dateline: 'Under the Old Tree of Aryah, Tropical Africa'.