The study of history is an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have, everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.

Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.