65 Quotes by Andrew Roberts

Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft. Churchill.

In the Second World War his bulldog obstinacy proved invaluable; during the Gallipoli campaign it left him appallingly vulnerable.

The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy,’ he later wrote in The World Crisis; ’the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’45.

This is a time to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged safe by conventional standards.

Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,” he once said. “When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.

If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords,’ he said. ‘It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.

If an English writer cannot say what he has to say in English, and in simple English, depend upon it, it is probably not worth saying.

I am arrogant,’ he once said of himself in a perceptive piece of self-analysis, ’but not conceited.

If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.