Quotes About History

Well, I'm a Lovelace. My family quit Shadowhunting due to laziness in the 1700s.

Magnus believed that many old things were creations of enduring beauty. The pyramids. Michelangelo's David. Versailles. Magnus himself.

Soap wasn't invented until the Romans, who also invented interesting sex. (Since my editor informs me that a gardening book is not a proper venue for discussions of interesting sex, I will go into this topic in more detail when I write my private memoirs, 'A Petunia Named Desire').

In those days, when Indians killed whites, it was a "massacre"; it was a "battle" when whites killed Indians.

Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.

Let's here it for modern dentistry, eh?" I said, and he grimaced. Actually, as much as people dislike going to the dentist now, try doing it two hundred years ago, when having a cavity meant some quack knocking it out with a chisel and a hammer in the market square. With no anesthetic.

Men are natural warriors, but a woman in battle is truly bloodthirsty." —Old Scottish saying> <

In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin.

The body of Katherine de Valois, buried 1483, had been a grisly exhibit since she was dug up in 1502, when the chapel was demolished on the orders of Henry VII. Katherine's body was placed in a wooden box near her husband's tomb and Henry fully intended to have her reburied.

the disturbing possibility that the Spanish Lady might stage a return visit,

Only Mary Queen of Scots challenged the prevailing orthodoxy when she wore white to mourn the death of Lord Darnley in 1567, earning the title of 'The White Queen'.

However, not everyone who was entitled to an elaborate funeral received one. When Jane Seymour died in 1537, a fortnight after the birth of Edward VI, Henry VIII made strenuous attempts to restrict extravagant mourning.

As an architectural marvel, Bethlem appeared in at least thirty-six tourist guides in 1681.

In fact, the tunnel curves between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park.

A year after the Great Plague, London was destroyed by fire. Seventy per cent of its houses vanished into the flames. St Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, Christ's Hospital and the north end of London Bridge were engulfed. Thirteen thousand buildings, including eighty-nine churches, disappeared for ever.

Hanging had been introduced by the Anglo-Saxons during the fifth century as a punishment for murder, theft and treason.

Despite the fact that England was nominally a Christian country, the church had no reservations about capital punishment, with St Paul and Thomas Aquinas enlisted in its defence.

Against all odds, Bethlem survived. The Bishopsgate building endured the Civil War, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London a year later, after which the hospital's governors realised that it needed a new home. In 1676 'New Bedlam' opened in Moorfields, with patients transferred to a 'palace beautiful' designed by the genius polymath Robert Hooke.

Asylums had originated in France in the seventeenth century, under the influence of Louis XIV, who, during the 1660s, locked up anyone likely to oppose him in a giant police operation described by Foucault as 'the Great Confinement', when over 6,000 people were incarcerated in the Hôpital Général.

Intent on wiping out their oppressors, Boudicca's army descended on London and burned it to the ground. This first Great Fire of London was so intense that it melted bronze coins, scorching the earth so profoundly that archaeologists discovered a seared layer of soil centuries later.

his first Tory cabinet were so young they were referred to as the Who? Who? Cabinet)

In previous campaigns, only the bodies of officers were returned for burial. The rank and file casualties of Waterloo and the Crimea had been interred in mass graves. It was not until the American Civil and Franco-Prussian wars that the concept of military cemeteries for all participants developed.

Three out of five Civil War soldiers who died during the war were killed by disease unrelated to wounds.

Underground, the stars are legend.