70 Quotes by Amanda Foreman

In 1961, an official U.S. commission oversaw thousands of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War. All 50 states joined in, but not surprisingly, the biggest events took place in the 11 southern states that made up the defeated Confederacy.

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

Southern politicians who have tried to rise above the passionate rhetoric surrounding the Civil War have frequently found themselves dragged back into the mire. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was forced to apologise when his proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month failed to make any reference to slavery.

It is our lack of will that lies behind the continued denial of justice to Jean McConville. Yet there is something that we can do now for her and for ourselves before our silence turns us from spectators into passive accomplices. We can remember her.

Teach her story to future generations, and at least the moral debt owed to Jean McConville can be repaid. Jean McConville. Jean McConville. Jean McConville.

The most famous line in gastronomic history, 'Let them eat cake', turns out to have been an eighteenth-century cliche. According to Antonia Fraser, the French accused every foreign queen of saying it, beginning in 1670 with the wife of Louis XIV, Marie Theresa.

Marie-Antoinette was born in 1755, the youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Emperor Francis I. She was intelligent and artistic but devoid of the ambition or calculation required to survive in the fetid atmosphere of the French court. In many ways, her character was not unlike that of Mary, Queen of Scots.

With a good education and a solid childhood, Marie-Antoinette might have become one of the most admired women in Europe. As it was, the empress paid no attention to her youngest daughter until an accident of nuptial politics made the girl a candidate to marry the French dauphin.

With every generation comes a new wave of hopefuls: small-town escapees, European refugees, disaffected Londoners.