No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.Collection: Government
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.Collection: History
The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.Collection: History
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.Collection: War
Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.
Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
Books are humanity in print.
The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.
For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.
Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.
The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.
If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.
I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.
If a man is a writer, everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do; it's not professional.'
After the war, when my husband came home, we had two more children, and domesticity for a while prevailed combined with beginning the work I had always wanted to do, which was writing a book.
When the children were very small, I worked in the morning only, and then gradually, as they spent full days at school, I could spend full days at work.