Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.