Journalists From England

"The details of diplomatic history do indeed seem of irredeemable triviality; but in fact, diplomatic history deals with the greatest of themes – with the relations of States, with peace and war, with the existence and destruction of communities and civilization."

"The only danger to history today is that historians are sometimes too modest and try to find excuses for their task. It is safer as well as sounder to be confident. Men write history for the same reason that they write poetry, study the properties of numbers, or play football—for the joy of creation; men read history for the same reason that they listen to music or watch cricket—for the joy of appreciation. Once abandon that firm ground, once plead that history has a "message" or that history has a "social responsibility" (to produce good Marxists or good Imperialists or good citizens) and there is no logical escape from the censor and the Index, the O.G.P.U. and the Gestapo."

"Anglo-German relations between 1884 and 1914 abound in these private letters and unofficial visits, culminating in another British surrender and renewed protestations of friendship. But in the last years before 1914 British politicians were beginning to realise that only one thing could end these quarrels and secure German friendship for ever—the adoption of a policy which would give the Germans what they called security, but what to others appeared as German hegemony over the entire continent of Europe. Even Gladstone and Granville would have been unwilling to buy German friendship at this price."

"The average Englishman was ashamed of the British Empire and believed (quite wrongly) that it had been acquired in some wicked fashion... This sense of sin placed British governments at a disadvantage in their negotiations with Germany: they were convinced of the justice of German grievances even before the grievances were expressed. British governments had spent most of the nineteenth century trying to prevent the growth of the British Empire, and still it had grown; German governments had done their utmost to encourage colonial enterprise, and yet their empire was a failure; clearly it was the fault of British governments and they must put it right... there they stood, ears anxiously cocked for the next German complaint. Moreover, British politicians have always been peculiarly sensitive to the charge of "unfriendliness" towards other politicians or other countries... Granville's letters to Herbert Bismarck—my dear fellow, what can be wrong?—are not unique in the record of British policy, and if the dear fellow insists on this or that as the price of renewing eternal friendship, of course he must have it."

"Injustice occurs in free states as in despotic states; and the attempt to right the wrong is as unpopular and dangerous in the one as in the other – as the case of Zola shows. The difference between free and unfree countries is that in the free country there are always men who will champion the unpopular cause at whatever the cost. It is this stage army of the good, with its slightly ridiculous reappearances which alone keeps our liberties alive. The Dreyfus case, at its outset, was a disgrace for France; but because of the struggles of a small minority it ended in bringing France more glory than all the campaigns of Napoleon."

"A revolution cannot be judged by the ordinary standards of academic morality."

"Monetarism has triumphed... whatever Callaghan and others may say Enoch Powell, it seems, has been right all along."

"I called myself a Marxist from the time I became a Socialist. But, reading more history at Oxford, I began to feel that Marxism did not work. Consider the famous sentence in the Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto recorded society is the history of class struggles." Very impressive but not true. Perhaps all history ought to have been the history of class struggles, but things did not work out that way. There have been long periods of class collaboration and many struggles that were not about class at all. I suppose my mind is too anarchic to be fitted into any system of thought. Like Johnson's friend Edwards, I, too, have tried to be a Marxist but common sense kept breaking in."

"I came of Radical, Dissenting stock on both sides. A collateral ancestor of my father's was killed at Peterloo. My maternal great-grandfather voted for Orator Hunt at the Preston by-election in 1830 and received one of the medals struck in honor of "the free and independent voters of Preston." My father was a Lloyd George Radical before the First World War."

"Our basic conviction is that the world owes us a living... We need new and ruthless leadership. We need an economic order where the creative leaders receive greater rewards and the administrators receive less."

"When I wrote English History 1914–1945 I believed that victory and the Attlee government made a triumphant conclusion. Now I feel differently. The incompetence of an arrogant governing class has led the country to decay and ruin."

"My experiences in the General Strike cured me of communism... I decided that the Communist Party was not for me and quietly lapsed, thus escaping the soul torments that troubled so many intellectuals during the 1930s."

"The Arabs have justified grievances in the Middle East. The Palestinians should weigh heavy on the conscience of the Great Powers."

"The Commune illustrates the general principle that a revolution occurs not simply as a matter of material suffering, but when a regime is discredited by incompetence and failure... The Communards, though not factory workers, were proletarians in the original sense. They were the eternally oppressed, and they aspired, however clumsily, to found a society where the tyranny of the few over the many would cease for evermore."

"Many nations have made great sacrifices for others and none has made more than his own two countries, Great Britain and the United States."

"There are some moral principles more important to me than economics. I am against racial discrimination. I am against privilege. I am for the sovereign independence of this country and for the unity of the Commonwealth. Labour does not help me on any of these."

"Taylor's Law states: "The Foreign Office knows no secrets.""

"History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work."

"In the second World war the British people came of age. This was a people's war. Not only were their needs considered. They themselves wanted to win. Future historians may see the war as a last struggle for the European balance of power or for the maintenance of Empire. This was not how it appeared to those who lived through it. The British people had set out to destroy Hitler and National Socialism—"Victory at all costs". They succeeded. No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade. The British were the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet they remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the people improved. Few now sang "Land of Hope and Glory". Few even sang "England Arise". England had risen all the same."

"Models of manly beauty are rare out of novels, and seldom interesting in them."

"These statements were, as he felt even in making them, not only gratuitous, but utterly unconvincing, but he had arrived at that condition in which a man discovers with terror the unsuspected amount of mendacity latent in his system."

"He called to mind all the millionaires he had ever read or heard of; they didn’t seem to get much fun out of their riches. The majority of them were martyrs to dyspepsia. They were often weighed down by the cares and responsibilities of their position; the only people who were unable to obtain an audience of them at any time were their friends; they lived in a glare of publicity, and every post brought them hundreds of begging letters, and a few threats; their children were in constant danger from kidnappers, and they themselves, after knowing no rest in life, could not be certain that even their tombs would be undisturbed. Whether they were extravagant or thrifty, they were equally maligned, and, whatever the fortune they left behind them, they could be absolutely certain that, in a couple of generations, it would be entirely dissipated."

"“How excellent is the saying of one of old: ‘He that adventureth upon matrimony is like unto one who thrusteth his hand into a sack containing many thousands of serpents and one eel. Yet, if Fate so decree, he may draw forth the eel.’”"

"“Wisely was it written: ‘Let him that desireth oblivion confer benefits—but the memory of an injury endureth for ever.’”"

"“No doubt the fault was mine,” said the Professor, in a tone that implied the opposite."

"I can’t call myself a busy man—unfortunately,” said Horace, with that frankness which scorns to conceal what other people know perfectly well already."

"No doubt they would tolerate him now for the Professor’s sake; but who would not rather be ignored than tolerated?"

"Candour’s the cement of friendship."

"“And you suppose that, knowing how I have changed, he will believe that!” she cried. “He will fire long before you can finish one of those fine sentences!”"

"Drastic measures is Latin for a whopping."

"Two or three days at sea are equivalent to at least as many weeks on shore."

"He was not a strong-minded man; but he had one quality which is almost as valuable a safeguard against temptation as strength of mind—namely, timidity."

"The knowledge that one has a remedy within reach is often as effectual as the remedy itself, if not more so."

"He had had a warning, a practical moral lesson which had merely arrived, as such things often do, rather after date."

"Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone."

"One thing that's good about procrastination is that you always have something planned for tomorrow."

"Man is a complex being who makes deserts bloom and lakes die."

"Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute."

"She was the perfect cliché among dear little old ladies, down to the very lavender bags she placed among her linen."

"“Veracity, as thou wilt learn,” answered the Jinnee, “is not invariably the Ship of Safety.”"

"“Thou hast heard of her incomparable charms, and verily the ear may love before the eye.” ”It may,” admitted Horace, “but neither of my ears is the least in love at present.”"

"During one of my annual visits to the great Fred Winter's yard I said to him, 'Good God, Fred, your horses look magnificent. Beautifully fit.' Of course they do, you twit,' he said. 'They don't sit up all night drinking gin and tonic and playing cards.'"

"Since 1960 or thereabouts, when the Beatles and feminism came to power and destroyed the civilisation I was rather fond of..."

"In 1950 when I was boxing I wanted to put on 3lb so my trainer made me put a teaspoon of powdered gelatine into the cup every time I took tea. It was fairly revolting & might possibly explain the final hammering I took."

"[On the Feminist Dale Spender] It staggers me. In fact I have not been so staggered since I last wore 8oz gloves."

"As for asking me have I ever felt remorse after drinking, I have been living with remorse for years now. She wakes me up every morning. She puts me to bed at night and yea though I run through the valley of Oxford St to the Coach & Horses she is by my side."

"I could stuff a pillow with the amount of confetti I have had thrown at me. And could I sleep easily on that? No."

"I once had to dispense with a literary agent because she drank too much. She was very surprised but I pointed out to her, quite logically I thought, that one of us had to be sober and it certainly wasn't going to be me."

"I'd very much like to wake up one morning with a cow of the Friesian variety and walk her down to Soho to the Coach and Horses, stopping on the way to buy twenty Players, ply her with vodkas until closing time, whip her off to an Indian restaurant, take her up to the Colony Room till 5.30 and then to the Yorkminster, Swiss Tavern, Three Greyhounds, get beaten up by Chinese waiters at midnight, have a row with the taxi driver, set the bed on fire, put it out with tears and then wake up on the floor. Could you then milk said cow? I doubt it."

"When I was a boy, I naively thought that this thing called happiness would be something I would wake up to find every day once I could smoke, drink and fornicate."