9 Quotes by Stephen Clarke

Faced with this endless British troublemaking, Napoleon was, in Bonapartist French eyes, like a kung fu master, meditating peacefully on his prayer mat about progress and democracy while a gang of irritating English boys threw acorns at him, finally forcing him to get up and give them a slap.

If they wanted their shit stirred, then stirred their shit was jolly well going to be.

Napoleon's aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l'Empereur.

Napoleon recalled his dismay at seeing 'mountains of swirling red flames, like huge ocean waves, exploding up into the sky of fire, then sinking into the sea of flames below'.

We Brits feel no resentment about 'losing' our American colonies. We're quite fond of independent Americans, and see them as distant cousins who can't spell our language properly. We've cooperated with America pretty amicably on projects like liberating Europe and inventing pop music. And we have no desire whatsoever to try and govern Texas.

Austria is a country founded on pastries, and a visit to a Viennese coffee shop makes you wonder how a nation that devotes so much energy to producing it's dizzying variety of delicious Kuchen and Torten could ever have done something so hideously uncake-like as support Hitler in 1938.

She was looking at me as if I was a painting too, to be examined for symbols and meaning, and she couldn't decide in the end if I really was just a mass of pointless daubs

It was Voltaire who said that ‘in a government, you need both shepherds and butchers.’ The problem in France was that the butchers kept killing the shepherds, while the sheep turned cannibal.

Calling a tenth- or eleventh-century Norman a Frenchman would have been a bit like telling a Glaswegian he’s English, and we all know how dangerous that can be.