Voices From the Past E-Book

W.B. Marsh

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1396

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

366 quotations - one for every day of the (leap) year - each with a fascinating historical story In a treasure trove for history buffs, W. B. Marsh fleshes out the context behind famous quotations associated with each day of the year, sending us back and forth in history from the time of the Ancient Egyptians to the world we live in today. 'You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war.' (25 April 1898) Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst urges war artist Frederick Remington to stay in Cuba while Hearst publishes lurid tales of an imaginary conflict. 'I am tasting the stars!' (4 August 1693) The monk Dom Pérignon tests the result of his new techniques in the making of sparkling wine, and champagne is born. 'I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.' (20 March 1852) Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin, the nineteenth century's bestseller apart from the Bible. 'From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a step.' (18 October 1812) Napoleon's all-conquering Grande Armée begins its slow and ignominious retreat from Moscow.

Leseprobe

vFor Ingrid, without whom little would have been possible and even less worth doing.

Contents

Title PageDedicationPreface1 January 404 AD: The last gladiator fight: ‘Hail, Caesar! They who are about to die salute you.’2 January 1492: Ferdinand and Isabella capture Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain: ‘You do well to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.’3 January 1946: British traitor Lord Haw-Haw is hanged: ‘Ich liebe Deutschland! Heil Hitler! and farewell.’4 January 1960: Albert Camus is killed in a car accident: ‘Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity.’5 January 1477: Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, is defeated and killed at Nancy: ‘Before Grandson, lost treasure. Before Morat, lost heart. Before Nancy, lost life.’6 January 1017: Cnut is crowned at St Paul’s Cathedral: ‘Rise not – obey my commands and do not presume to wet the edge of my robe.’7 January 1558: The French recapture Calais, the last English possession on mainland France: ‘When I am dead and opened, you shall find “Philip” and “Calais” engraved on my heart.’8 January 1337: Giotto dies in Florence: ‘In painting Cimabue thought that he/Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry,/So that the other’s fame is growing dim.’9 January 1916: The Allies pull out of the failed Gallipoli invasion: ‘I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die.’10 January 49 BC: Caesar crosses the Rubicon: ‘Let the die be cast.’ viii11 January 1964: The US Surgeon General issues the first report that cigarettes are hazardous to your health: ‘A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.’12 January 1519: Spanish conquistador Núñez de Balboa is beheaded: ‘Lies, lies!’13 January 1898: Émile Zola accuses the French government over the Dreyfus affair: ‘J’Accuse … !’14 January 1957: Humphrey Bogart dies: ‘The whole world is three drinks behind.’15 January 1951: The Bitch of Buchenwald is sentenced to prison: ‘After the tattooed prisoners had been examined, the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were kept in the dispensary, and then killed by injections.’16 January 1547: Ivan the Terrible is crowned first tsar of Russia: ‘We have ascended the throne by the bidding of God.’17 January 532 AD: Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora crush the Nika revolt: ‘The throne is a glorious sepulchre.’18 January 1919: The Versailles Peace Conference opens: ‘This is not a peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.’19 January 1568: Philip II incarcerates his son, Don Carlos: ‘Does your Majesty want to kill me?’20 January 1942: Reinhard Heydrich convenes the Wannsee Conference to set in motion the ‘Final Solution’: ‘It is the curse of the great man to have to step over corpses.’21 January 1793: Louis XVI is guillotined: ‘The king must die so that the country may live.’ ix22 January 1879: British troops are massacred at Isandlwana before a heroic defence at Rorke’s Drift: ‘March slowly, attack at dawn and eat up the red soldiers.’23 January 1781: William Pitt the Younger enters Parliament: ‘England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’24 January 41 AD: Caligula is murdered by his own guards: ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’25 January 41 AD: The Roman Senate accepts Claudius as emperor: ‘A monstrosity of a human being, one that Nature began and never finished.’26 January 1788: The first British convicts land in Australia: ‘Without exception the finest Harbour in the World.’27 January 1945: Russian troops liberate Auschwitz: ‘Arbeit macht frei’.28 January 1809: Napoleon berates Talleyrand: ‘Vous êtes de la merde dans un bas de soie!’29 January 1536: Anne Boleyn miscarries: ‘She has miscarried of her saviour.’30 January 1649: Charles I is beheaded: ‘A subject and a sovereign are clear different things.’31 January 1974: Hollywood legend Samuel Goldwyn dies at 94: ‘I don’t think anybody should write his autobiography until after he’s dead.’1 February 1896: Puccini’s La bohème premieres in Turin: ‘I lived that Bohème, when there wasn’t yet any thought stirring in my brain of seeking the theme of an opera.’2 February 1461: Owen Tudor is executed: ‘The head that used to lie in Queen Catherine’s lap would now lie in the executioner’s basket.’ x3 February 1014: King Sweyn Forkbeard dies after a fall from his horse: ‘Because there were no bounds to his malice, Divine Vengeance did not allow the blasphemer to live any longer.’4 February 211 AD: Roman Emperor Septimius Severus dies in York: ‘Be united, enrich the soldiers, and despise all others.’5 February 1885: King Leopold II of Belgium takes over the Congo: ‘The Congo Free State is unique in its kind. It has nothing to hide and no secrets and is not beholden to anyone except its founder.’6 February 1481: The first auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition: ‘The angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just,/And shall cast them into the furnace of fire.’7 February 1497: Savonarola ignites the bonfire of the vanities in Florence: ‘I have seen man’s infinite misery, the rapes, the adulteries, the robberies, the pride, the idolatry, the vile curses, all the violence of a society that has lost all capacity for good.’8 February 1587: Mary, Queen of Scots is beheaded: ‘The Queen entered the room full of grace and majesty, just as if she were coming to a ball.’9 February 1950: Senator Joseph McCarthy accuses the State Department of harbouring communists: ‘I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party.’10 February 1306: Robert the Bruce stabs the Red Comyn in church: ‘I mak sikker.’11 February 1990: After 27 years incarcerated, Nelson Mandela is released from prison: ‘I never lose. Either I win or I learn.’12 February 1554: Lady Jane Grey is beheaded: ‘The crown is not my right and pleases me not.’xi13 February 1542: Henry VIII’s fifth wife is executed after nineteen months of marriage: ‘Few, if any, ladies now at court would henceforth aspire to such an honour.’14 February 1779: Captain Cook is killed by natives on Hawaii: ‘Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.’15 February 399 BC: A jury in Athens sentences Socrates to death: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’16 February 1804: Stephen Decatur leads a raid in Tripoli: ‘The most bold and daring act of the Age.’17 February 1801: Thomas Jefferson is elected America’s third president: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’18 February 1546: Martin Luther dies: ‘I make war on the living, not on the dead.’19 February 1942: President Franklin Roosevelt authorises the internment of Japanese Americans: ‘The successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage.’20 February 1944: Norwegian saboteurs sink the SF Hydro ferry, denying Nazi Germany the heavy water needed to make an atomic bomb: ‘In the end, there was just a tiny insignificant pop.’21 February 1598 & 1613 Boris Godunov is elected tsar; Michael Romanov is elected tsar: ‘No! You should not have offered my son such a dangerous responsibility.’22 February 1943: Germany’s White Rose conspirators are guillotined: ‘Long live freedom!’23 February 1455: Gutenberg publishes his Bible: ‘The script was very neat and legible, not at all difficult to follow – your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses.’xii24 February 1871: Darwin publishes The Descent of Man: ‘Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.’25 February 1429: Joan of Arc recognises King Charles at Chinon: ‘The King of Heaven has ordained that, through me, you will be anointed and crowned in Reims.’26 February 1936: Hitler inaugurates a factory to build the first Volkswagen: ‘Five marks a week you must put aside,/If in your own car you want to ride.’27 February 1943: German wives protest in Berlin: ‘Give us back our husbands!’28 February 1944: Hanna Reitsch proposes a suicide squadron to Hitler: ‘Many Germans feel guilty about the war. But they don’t explain the real guilt we share – that we lost.’29 February 45 BC: Julius Caesar decrees a new calendar: ‘Even the stars now obey Caesar in his commands.’1 March 1955: Churchill makes his last major speech in the House of Commons: ‘Never flinch, never weary, never despair.’2 March 1941: The Free French capture Kufra: ‘We are on the march; we will stop only when the French flag waves from Strasbourg Cathedral.’3 March 1918: Russia leaves the First World War as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is signed: ‘Bolsheviks are tigers, round them up and shoot them!’4 March 1193: Saladin dies in Damascus: ‘Go and take my shroud through the streets and cry loudly, “Behold all that Saladin, who conquered the East, bears away of his conquests”.’5 March 1770: The Boston Massacre: ‘Facts are stubborn things.’6 March 1836: Texian defenders in the Alamo are overwhelmed by Mexican attackers after a thirteen-day siege: ‘Remember the Alamo!’xiii7 March 1815: Napoleon confronts the king’s soldiers at Laffrey: ‘If there is among you a soldier who wants to kill his emperor, here I am.’8 March 1983: Ronald Reagan challenges the Soviet Union: ‘An evil empire’.9 March 1661: Cardinal Mazarin dies: ‘In France a woman will not go to sleep until she has talked over affairs of state with her lover or her husband.’10 March 1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call: ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you.’11 March 1507: Cesare Borgia is slain in battle: ‘Here, in a scant piece of earth, lies he whom all the world feared.’12 March 1938: Hitler’s troops March into Austria: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’.13 March 1881: Tsar Alexander II is assassinated by a terrorist bomb: ‘It is too early to thank God.’14 March 1757: Admiral John Byng is shot on the Monarch: ‘Pour encourager les autres’.15 March 1921: Ottoman Turkey’s Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha is assassinated in Berlin: ‘I am ready to die for what I have done, and I know I shall die for it.’16 March 597 BC: Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem: ‘The Babylonian king marched to the land of Hatti, besieged the City of Judah and on the second day of the month of Adar took the city and captured the king.’17 March 1526: François I returns to France after a year in captivity in Madrid: ‘All is lost save honour!’18 March 978 AD: Edward the Martyr, King of England, is murdered at Corfe Castle: ‘No worse deed than this was done to the English race, since they first sought out the land of Britain.’xiv19 March 1314: The Grand Master of the Templars is burned at the stake: ‘God will avenge our death.’20 March 1852:Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published: ‘I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.’21 March 1556: Bishop Cranmer is burnt at the stake: ‘This is the hand that wrote it, therefore shall it suffer first punishment.’22 March 1594: Henri IV enters Paris, at last accepted as king: ‘Paris is well worth a mass.’23 March 59 AD: Nero murders his mother: ‘Smite my womb.’24 March 1603: Queen Elizabeth I dies: ‘All my possessions for a moment of time!’25 March 1199: Richard the Lionheart is felled by an arrow at Châlus: ‘I forgive you my death and will exact no revenge.’26 March 1827: Beethoven dies in Vienna: ‘I shall hear in heaven.’27 March 1793: Vendéan leader François-Athanase Charette is tried by Republican France: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’28 March 1941: Virginia Woolf throws herself into the River Ouse: ‘Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.’29 March 1912: Scott dies at the South Pole: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’30 March 1981: Ronald Reagan is shot: ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’31 March 1492: Ferdinand and Isabella order the expulsion of Jews from Spain: ‘Judas sold Jesus Christ for thirty pieces of silver. You would sell Him for three hundred thousand ducats.’1 April 1810: Napoleon marries for the second time: ‘It is a womb that I am marrying.’2 April 1801: British and Danish fleets meet in the Battle of Copenhagen: ‘I have the right to be blind sometimes … I really do not see the signal.’3 April 1882: Jesse James is shot in the back by one of his own gang: ‘Murdered by a traitor and a coward whose name is not worthy to appear here’.4 April 896 AD: Pope Formosus dies: ‘Why did you usurp the universal Roman See in such a spirit of ambition?’5 April 1794: Danton goes to the guillotine: ‘Show my head to the people. It’s worth seeing.’6 April 1917: The US declares war on Germany: ‘The course of history is always being altered by something or other – if not by a horseshoe nail, then by an intercepted telegram.’7 April 1300: The Divine Comedy begins: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’8 April 1099: During the First Crusade, French soldier and mystic Peter Bartholomew subjects himself to ordeal by fire: ‘If it is the Lance of the Lord, I will pass through the fire unhurt.’9 April 1553: Rabelais dies in Paris: ‘I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor.’10 April 1919: Emiliano Zapata is ambushed by government troops: ‘It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.’11 April 1951: President Truman fires General Douglas MacArthur: ‘I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the laws for generals.’12 April 1096: The Peasants’ Crusade sets out for the Holy Land: ‘Dieu le volt!’xvi13 April 1655: Louis XIV asserts his power: ‘L’État, c’est moi.’14 April 1488: Girolamo Riario is assassinated: ‘I have the mould to make more!’15 April 1755: Dr Johnson publishes his dictionary: ‘A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge’.16 April 1917: Lenin returns to Russia from exile: ‘They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.’17 April 1355: Venetian Doge Marin Falier is beheaded in the Doge’s Palace: ‘Marin Falier of the beautiful wife;/Others enjoy her, he maintains her.’18 April 1521: Martin Luther confronts Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’19 April 1314: Scandal at the Tour de Nesle: ‘He is neither a man nor a beast, but a statue.’20 April 1814: Napoleon says farewell to his Guard: ‘Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell.’21 April 1736: Prince Eugene dies in Vienna: ‘I am growing old from the feet upwards, but I know someone it is happening to just as fast from the head downwards.’22 April 1836: Sam Houston captures General Santa Anna: ‘You have captured the Napoleon of the Western world.’23 April 1348: Edward III holds the first ceremony of the Order of the Garter: ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense.’24 April 387 AD: St Augustine is baptised: ‘O Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’xvii25 April 1898: The US declares war on Spain to start the Spanish–American War: ‘You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.’26 April 1478: The Pazzi conspiracy explodes in Florence: ‘Do what you wish, provided there be no killing.’27 April 1805: US Marines capture Derna: ‘From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli’.28 April 1772: Johann Friedrich Struensee is executed for his affair with the King of Denmark’s wife: ‘The Queen of Tears’.29 April 1624: Richelieu in the ascendant: ‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them to have him hanged.’30 April 1524: The Chevalier de Bayard is killed retreating from Robecco: ‘There is no need to pity me, for I die as a man of honour. But I pity you, because you are fighting against your king, your country and your oath.’1 May 1898: American Admiral Dewey wins the Battle of Manila Bay: ‘You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.’2 May 1863: Stonewall Jackson is mortally wounded at Chancellorsville: ‘Let us pass over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.’3 May 1915: Major John McCrae honours a fallen comrade with a poem: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row’.4 May 1555: Nostradamus publishes Les Prophéties: ‘The young lion will overcome the old/In the field of war by a single duel’.5 May 1821: Napoleon dies on Saint Helena: ‘You try to distract yourself from the pain, but only death will end it.’ xviii6 May 53 BC: Crassus is killed at the Battle of Carrhae: ‘Greed is but a word jealous men inflict upon the ambitious.’7 May 1945: Germany surrenders during the Second World War: ‘The eagle has ceased to scream, but the parrots will now begin to chatter.’8 May 1760: Frederick the Great writes a letter: ‘God is always with the strongest battalions.’9 May 1960: ‘The Pill’ goes on sale in the USA: ‘No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.’10 May 1933: Nazis burn books all over Germany: ‘Where they burn books, /they end up burning people, too.’11 May 1745: The French under Maurice de Saxe defeat the Pragmatic Army at the Battle of Fontenoy: ‘The blood of our enemies is still the blood of men.’12 May 1641: The Earl of Strafford is beheaded on Tower Hill: ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, for in them there is no salvation.’13 May 1637: Cardinal Richelieu invents the table knife: ‘God in his wisdom has provided man with natural forks – his fingers.’14 May 1610: Henri IV is murdered: ‘I saw the blood on my knife and the place where I hit him …’15 May 1711: Alexander Pope publishes An Essay on Criticism: ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing.’ ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’16 May 1770: The future Louis XVI marries Marie Antoinette: ‘The King of France would have been whipped so that he would have ejaculated out of sheer rage like a donkey.’17 May 1838: Talleyrand dies: ‘Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.’18 May 1302: The Flemish massacre the French at Bruges: ‘Scilt ende vrient’.19 May 1802: First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte creates the Legion of Honour: ‘It’s with baubles that men are led.’20 May 1217: William Marshal saves England from French occupation at the Battle of Lincoln: ‘I would carry him on my shoulders step by step, from island to island, from country to country, and I would not fail him, not even if it meant begging my bread.’21 May 47 BC: Julius Caesar defeats King Pharnaces at Vela: ‘Veni, vidi, vici’.22 May 1809: Napoleonic Marshal Lannes has his legs shot off by a cannonball: ‘I found him a pigmy, but I lost him a giant.’23 May 1945: Heinrich Himmler commits suicide: ‘I am Heinrich Himmler.’24 May 1543: The happy death of Nicolaus Copernicus: ‘As though seated on a royal throne, the Sun governs the family of planets revolving around it.’25 May 1085: Gregory VII (Hildebrand) dies in exile: ‘I have loved righteousness and I have hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.’26 May 1922: Vladimir Lenin suffers the first of four strokes that will kill him: ‘There was an old bastard named Lenin/Who did two or three million men in.’27 May 1234: Louis IX (St Louis) marries Marguerite de Provence: ‘Alas! You won’t let me see my lord, neither dead nor alive!’28 May 1754: Lieutenant Colonel George Washington ambushes a French reconnaissance party to start the French and Indian War: ‘The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.’29 May 1328: Philippe VI of France is crowned at Reims: ‘Qui m’aime me suive!’30 May 1593: Christopher Marlowe is killed in a tavern brawl: ‘All they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles.’31 May 1785: Cardinal Rohan is cleared of stealing Marie Antoinette’s diamonds: ‘I used the full scope of my intelligence to prove that I am a fool.’1 June 1215: Genghis Khan conquers Beijing: ‘Our Empire is like the sea, yours is but a handful of sand.’2 June 1835: Showman P.T. Barnum starts on his first tour: ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’3 June 1865: George V is born in London: ‘For seventeen years, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps.’4 June 1798: Italian adventurer Giovanni Casanova dies: ‘I have lived as a philosopher and die as a Christian.’5 June 1305: Bertrand de Got becomes Pope Clement V: ‘He has a beautiful pair of them, and they are really hanging well, just like our figs.’6 June 1654: Queen Christina of Sweden abdicates: ‘Women who rule only make themselves ridiculous one way or the other.’7 June 1778: Beau Brummell is born in London: ‘Who’s your fat friend?’8 June 1913: Suffragette Emily Davison flings herself in front of the king’s horse at Epsom Downs: ‘Were women to “unsex” themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen, and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.’9 June 68 AD: Nero commits suicide: ‘What an artist dies in me!’10 June 1692: The first execution of the Salem witch trials: ‘I am as innocent as the child unborn.’xxi11 June 1509: Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing.’12 June 1429: Joan of Arc inspires a French victory at Jargeau: ‘Act, and God will act.’13 June 323 BC: Alexander the Great dies: ‘To the strongest.’14 June 1645: Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell defeat Charles I at Naseby, the decisive battle of the English Civil War: ‘God will not suffer rebels to prosper, or this cause to be overthrown.’15 June 1215: King John signs the Magna Carta: ‘It constitutes an insult to the Holy See, a serious weakening of the royal power, a disgrace to the English nation, a danger to all Christendom.’16 June 1846: Pius IX is elected Pope: ‘The Roman Pontiff cannot and ought not to reconcile himself or agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilisation.’17 June 1631: Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Shah Jahan, dies: ‘A teardrop on the face of eternity’.18 June 1940: In exile in London, Charles de Gaulle addresses the French people by radio: ‘No nation has friends, only interests.’19 June 1867: Mexican Emperor Maximilian I faces the firing squad: ‘May my blood put an end to the misfortunes of my new homeland!’20 June 1837: William IV dies, bringing his niece Victoria to the throne: ‘It will touch every sailor’s heart to have a girl queen to fight for.’21 June 1943: Jean Moulin is arrested by the Gestapo: ‘For the days in which he was still able to speak or write, the fate of the whole Resistance hung on the courage of this one man.’22 June 1633: Galileo is condemned by Pope Urban VIII: ‘E pur si muove.’ xxii23 June 79 AD: Emperor Vespasian dies: ‘Oh dear, I think I’m turning into a god.’24 June 1340: Edward III wins the first battle of the Hundred Years’ War: ‘The Kingdom of France is too great for a woman to hold, by reason of the imbecility of her sex.’25 June 1894: French President Sadi Carnot is assassinated: ‘Our response to the rulers will be dynamite, bomb, stiletto, dagger.’26 June 1409: Antipope Alexander V is crowned, making him the third rival pontiff: ‘Sic transit gloria mundi.’27 June 1743: The Battle of Dettingen: ‘Dinna fire till ye can see the whites of their e’en.’28 June 1519: Charles V is elected Holy Roman Emperor: ‘The empire on which the sun never sets.’29 June 1868: Pius IX convokes the First Vatican Council that declares papal infallibility: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’30 June 1934: Hitler purges the SA in the ‘Night of the Long Knives’: ‘If I am to be killed, let Adolf do it himself.’1 July 1270: Louis IX leaves on his last crusade: ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem!’2 July 1871: Rome becomes a capital again after 1,584 years: ‘We are here in Rome and here we will stay!’3 July 987 AD: Hugues Capet is crowned King of the Franks: ‘Who made you king?’4 July 1776: The US Declaration of Independence is signed: ‘We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.’ xxiii5 July 1813: Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb: ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’.6 July 1685: Royal forces defeat the rebel Duke of Monmouth at the Battle of Sedgemoor: ‘Do not hack at me as you did my Lord Russell.’7 July 1307: Edward I dies on campaign: ‘Carry my bones before you on the march. For the rebels will not be able to endure the sight of me, alive or dead.’8 July 452 AD: Pope Leo I meets Attila the Hun: ‘Thou, who hast conquered others, shouldst conquer thyself.’9 July 1472: Charles the Bold besieges Beauvais: ‘I desire the good of the kingdom more than you think, because instead of only one king, I would give it six.’10 July 1584: William the Silent is murdered: ‘That which the Prince most abhors in the world, is your Majesty. If he could, he would drink your Majesty’s blood.’11 July 1804: Aaron Burr mortally wounds Alexander Hamilton in America’s most famous duel: ‘When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.’12 July 1346: Edward III invades France: ‘This is a good token for me, for the land desireth to have me.’13 July 1380: Bertrand du Guesclin dies in battle: ‘Since I am so ugly, it behoves that I be bold.’14 July 1789: A Parisian mob storms the Bastille: ‘Is it a revolt?’ ‘No, Sire, it is a revolution.’15 July 2016: Recep Erdoğan crushes a coup d’état in Turkey: ‘Democracy is like a train; you get off once you have reached your destination.’16 July 1228: St Francis is canonised: ‘We ought not to have more use and esteem of money and coin than of stones.’17 July 1918: Tsar Nicholas II, Alexandra and their five children are shot at Yekaterinburg: ‘It seemed as if all of them guessed their fate, but not one of them uttered a single sound.’18 July 1925: Hitler publishes Mein Kampf: ‘When you tell a lie, tell big lies. This is what the Jews do.’19 July 1870: Napoleon III starts the Franco-Prussian War: ‘The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities, but by blood and iron.’20 July 1923: Pancho Villa is assassinated: ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.’21 July 1798: Napoleon Bonaparte wins the Battle of the Pyramids: ‘From the top of these pyramids, forty centuries are looking down upon you.’22 July 1209: Béziers is sacked during the Albigensian Crusade: ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’23 July 1952: Rebel Egyptian officers take over Cairo to overthrow King Farouk: ‘There will soon be only five kings left: the kings of England, diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs.’24 July 1974: The US Supreme Court orders President Nixon to surrender subpoenaed White House tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor: ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’25 July 813 AD: St James’s tomb is discovered: ‘He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword.’26 July 1533: Pizarro executes Inca emperor Atahualpa: ‘Mother Earth, witness how my enemies shed my blood.’xxv27 July 1214: Philip Augustus triumphs at the Battle of Bouvines: ‘If you think that the crown would be better served by one of you, I agree to it and want it most heartily and with good will.’28 July 1794: Robespierre is guillotined: ‘Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.’29 July 1890: Vincent van Gogh commits suicide: ‘The sadness will last for ever.’30 July 1683: Louis XIV’s wife Marie-Thérèse dies, clearing the path for Madame de Maintenon: ‘There is no compensation for the loss of liberty.’31 July 1777: The Marquis de Lafayette becomes an American major general: ‘I always consider myself, my dear General, as one of your lieutenants on a detached command.’1 August 1944: The start of the Warsaw Uprising: ‘The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth.’2 August 1876: Wild Bill Hickok is shot dead in Deadwood: ‘The dead man’s hand’.3 August 1347: Edward III shows mercy towards the burghers of Calais: ‘I humbly beseech you in the name of the son of Holy Mary and for your own love of me to show mercy to these men.’4 August 1693: Dom Perignon invents champagne: ‘I am tasting the stars!’5 August 1305: Scottish legend William Wallace is betrayed and captured: ‘I have slain the English; I have mortally opposed the English King; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own.’6 August 1623: Maffeo Barberini is elected Pope Urban VIII: ‘His kindred flew from Florence to Rome like so many bees … to suck the honey of the Church.’xxvi7 August 1543: Turkish and French troops begin the siege of Nice: ‘The Turks and the Frenchmen took three assaults to breach the Peyrolière bastion, past the tower of Cinq Quayre or Quinquangle, where Ségurana fought.’8 August 1918: The Allies smash the Germans at Amiens, the battle that turned the war: ‘The black day of the German Army’.9 August 1830: Louis-Philippe accepts the crown of France after the abdication of Charles X: ‘We are dancing on a volcano.’10 August 1846: The start of the world’s greatest museum: ‘An Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge’.11 August 1492: Rodrigo Borgia is elected Pope Alexander VI: ‘Now we are in the power of the wolf.’12 August 30 BC: Cleopatra finds a way to die: ‘Other women cloy/The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry/Where most she satisfies.’13 August 1521: Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés overthrows the Aztec Empire: ‘We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.’14 August 1945: Japan announces its unconditional surrender: ‘The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.’15 August 778 AD: Roland dies at the Battle of Roncesvalles: ‘The count Rolland, though blood his mouth doth stain,/And burst are both the temples of his brain,/His olifant he sounds with grief and pain.’16 August 1477: Emperor Maximilian makes a felicitous marriage: ‘The strong make war, but you, happy Austria, make marriages. What Mars grants to others, Venus gives to you.’17 August 1820: Queen Caroline is tried by Parliament: ‘Her Royal Highness had heard of the enormous size of his machine and sent for him by courier.’xxvii18 August 1503: The death of Pope Alexander VI: ‘I am coming, I am coming. It is right. Just wait a moment.’19 August 1588: Queen Elizabeth I addresses her soldiers at Tilbury: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.’20 August 1940: A Soviet assassin plants an ice axe in Leon Trotsky’s head: ‘It is impossible to displace him except by assassination.’21 August 1858: The first of the Lincoln–Douglas debates: ‘Though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I have gone.’22 August 1485: Henry Tudor defeats Richard III at Bosworth Field: ‘I will not budge a foot, I will die king of England.’23 August 79 AD: The Feast of Vulcanalia foreshadows the eruption of Vesuvius: ‘The greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world.’24 August 1113: The first Plantagenet is born: ‘A race much dipped in their own blood.’25 August 1944: General Jacques Leclerc liberates Paris: ‘Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!’26 August 1346: The Black Prince fights his first battle at Crécy: ‘Let the boy win his spurs.’27 August 55 BC: Caesar lands in Britain: ‘All the Britons dye themselves with woad, which produces a blue colour, and makes their appearance in battle more terrible.’28 August 1963: Martin Luther King in Washington: ‘I have a dream’.xxviii29 August 1915 & 1982: Ingrid Bergman dies on her 67th birthday: ‘I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again all in one lifetime.’30 August 70 AD: The destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple: ‘There is no merit in conquering people forsaken by their own god.’31 August 1870: Napoleon III is captured at the Battle of Sedan: ‘We are in a chamber pot and about to be shat upon.’1 September 1715: Louis XIV dies: ‘You are about to see one king in his tomb and another in his cradle.’2 September 1666: The Great Fire of London: ‘All the skie was of a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven.’3 September 401 BC: Xenophon’s march to the sea: ‘The sea! The sea!’4 September 476 AD: The last Roman emperor resigns: ‘Odoacer was the first barbarian who reigned in Italy, over a people who had once asserted their just superiority above the rest of mankind.’5 September 1793: The Reign of Terror begins: ‘Place Terror on the order of the day!’6 September 1901: Leon Czolgosz shoots President McKinley: ‘In the most naked way an assault not on power, not on wealth, but simply and solely upon free government.’7 September 1914: The Allies defeat the Germans at the first Battle of the Marne: ‘To the meaningless French idealisms, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, we oppose the German realities, Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery.’8 September 1298: Marco Polo is captured at the Battle of Korčula: ‘I have not written even half of what I saw.’9 September 1087: William the Conqueror dies near Rouen: ‘I was bred to arms from my childhood and am stained with rivers of blood that I have shed.’xxix10 September 1898: Austrian Empress Sisi’s last fatal journey: ‘Fate closes its eyes for a long time, but one day it finds us anyway.’11 September 9 AD: German tribes ambush the Romans in the Teutoburg Forest: ‘Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!’12 September 1565: The Turks abandon Malta after a four-month siege: ‘It is the great battle of the Cross and the Quran which is now to be fought.’13 September 1598: Philip III inherits the Spanish throne as Philip II dies at the Escorial: ‘God, who has given me so many kingdoms to govern, has not given me a son fit to govern them.’14 September 1516: François I wins the Battle of Marignano: ‘I want to wash my hands and swim in French blood.’15 September 1914 & 1916: Trench warfare begins, and tanks are invented to counter it: ‘My poor land battleships have been let off prematurely, on a petty scale.’16 September 1810: Miguel Hidalgo and ‘El Grito de Dolores’: ‘The Cry of Sorrows’.17 September 1916: The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, wins his first dogfight: ‘Fight on and fly on to the last drop of blood and the last drop of fuel, to the last beat of the heart.’18 September 14 AD: The Roman Senate validates Tiberius as emperor: ‘Holding a wolf by the ears’.19 September 1940: Polish officer Witold Pilecki is voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz: ‘Compared to them, Auschwitz was just child’s play.’20 September 1519: Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet circumnavigates the globe: ‘The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the Earth on the Moon and I have more faith in the shadow than in the Church.’xxx21 September 454 AD: Roman Emperor Valentinian murders his general Aetius in his throne room: ‘You have acted like a man who has cut off his right hand with his left.’22 September 1776: American patriot and spy Nathan Hale is hanged: ‘I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.’23 September 480 BC: The Greeks defeat the Persians at Salamis: ‘The wooden wall only shall not fail, but help you and your children.’24 September 622 AD: The prophet Muhammad completes his Hegira, or flight, from Mecca to Medina: ‘You are the Messenger of God.’25 September 1396: The last battle of the last Crusade: ‘The lion in them turned to timid hare.’26 September 1777: The British take Philadelphia: ‘No, Philadelphia has captured Howe!’27 September 52 BC: Caesar defeats Vercingetorix at Alesia: ‘Here I am, a strong man defeated by an even stronger one.’28 September 48 BC: Pompey the Great is assassinated: ‘A dead man does not bite.’29 September 1938: Prime Minister Chamberlain appeases Hitler: ‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.’30 September 1198: Richard the Lionheart defeats Philip Augustus at the Battle of Gisors: ‘Dieu et mon droit’.1 October 1814: Princess Bagration gives the first ball of the Congress of Vienna: ‘Le congrès ne marche pas, il danse.’2 October 1925: Josephine Baker opens in La Revue Nègre: ‘I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.’xxxi3 October 42 BC: The poet Horace fights at the first battle of Philippi: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ (‘It is sweet and honourable to die for your country.)4 October 732 AD: The Franks under Charles Martel meet the Moors at the Battle of Tours: ‘A dreadful plague of Saracens ravaged France with miserable slaughter, but they not long after in that country received the punishment due to their wickedness.’5 October 1795: Napoleon stops a mob: ‘We’ll give them a whiff of grapeshot.’6 October 1536: William Tyndale is burned at the stake: ‘Lord, open the eyes of the King of England.’7 October 1571: Don Juan de Austria reaches the summit of his career with the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto: ‘I spend my time building castles in the air, but in the end, all of them, and I, blow away in the wind.’8 October 1882: W.H. Vanderbilt damns the public: ‘The public be damned.’9 October 251 AD: Saint Denis is martyred: ‘The distance is nothing; it’s only the first step that is difficult.’10 October 1963: Edith Piaf dies: ‘Every damn thing you do in this life, you have to pay for.’11 October 1531: Swiss Protestant reformer Huldrych Zwingli is killed at Kappel: ‘They can kill the body but they cannot kill the soul.’12 October 1870: Confederate General Robert E. Lee dies: ‘It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.’13 October 1815: Joachim Murat is executed trying to regain his kingdom: ‘Soldiers! Do your duty! Straight to the heart but spare the face. Fire!’xxxii14 October 1962: The start of the Cuban Missile Crisis: ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.’15 October 1917: Mata Hari is shot: ‘Do not be afraid, sister. I know how to die.’16 October 1555: Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley are burned at the stake: ‘We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’17 October 1945: Juan Perón is freed from prison with the help of his mistress, Evita: ‘I will return and I will be millions.’18 October 1812: Napoleon begins the retreat from Moscow: ‘From the sublime to the ridiculous is only a step.’19 October 1813: Napoleon is defeated at the Battle of Leipzig: ‘The Colossus fell like an oak tree in a storm.’20 October 1960:Lady Chatterley’s Lover on trial: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’21 October 1854: Florence Nightingale leaves for the Crimean War: ‘The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.’22 October 1685: Louis XIV revokes the Edict of Nantes: ‘Une foi, une loi, un roi’.23 October 1739: Britain starts the War of Jenkins’ Ear: ‘They may ring their bells now, but they will soon be wringing their hands.’24 October 1945: Norwegian traitor and wartime president Vidkun Quisling is shot by a firing squad: ‘In ten years’ time I will have become another Saint Olaf.’25 October 1415 & 1854: The Battle of Agincourt and the Charge of the Light Brigade: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’xxxiii26 October 1881: The gunfight at the OK Corral: ‘You sons of bitches, you have been looking for a fight and now you can have it!’27 October 1553: Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus is burned at the stake: ‘I will burn, but this is a mere incident. We shall continue our discussion in eternity.’28 October 130 AD: Hadrian’s lover Antinous drowns in the Nile: ‘All the gods and goddesses will give him the breath of life, so that he breathes, eternally rejuvenated.’29 October 1929: Wall Street crashes on Black Tuesday: ‘Wall Street lays an egg.’30 October 1975: Francisco Franco falls into a final coma: ‘Spain has no foolish dreams.’31 October 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg: ‘As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul into heaven springs.’1 November 1503 & 1512: The Sistine Chapel is unveiled: ‘A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.’2 November 82 BC: Sulla conquers Rome: ‘No better friend, no worse enemy.’3 November 1793: Proto-feminist Olympe de Gouges is guillotined: ‘A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.’4 November 1942: The British defeat Rommel at El Alamein: ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps, the end of the beginning.’5 November 1757: Frederick the Great trounces the French and the Holy Roman Empire at the Battle of Rossbach: ‘Après nous, le déluge.’6 November 1796: Catherine the Great dies of a stroke: ‘I shall be an autocrat, that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me, that’s his.’xxxiv7 November 1805: Lewis and Clark reach the Pacific Ocean: ‘Ocian in view! O! the joy!’8 November 63 BC: Cicero accuses Catilina: ‘How long, Catilina, will you abuse our patience?’9 November 1923: Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch: ‘Either the German revolution begins tonight or we will all be dead by dawn!’10 November 1871: Henry Stanley meets Dr Livingstone: ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’11 November 1885: General George Patton is born: ‘No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.’12 November 1948: Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo is sentenced to hang: ‘This is farewell. I shall wait beneath the moss/Until the flowers are fragrant/In this island country of Japan.’13 November 1002: The St Brice’s Day massacre: ‘All the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed.’14 November 1913: Marcel Proust publishes Du côté de chez Swann: ‘I may be a blockhead, but I am unable to understand how a man can use thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in his bed before falling asleep!’15 November 1908: Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi dies: ‘I have often thought that I am the cleverest woman that ever lived.’16 November 1848: Chopin performs in his last concert in London’s Guildhall: ‘His playing is like the sighing of a flower, the whisper of the clouds, or the murmur of the stars.’17 November 1917: Georges Clemenceau becomes Prime Minister of France: ‘Domestic policy? I wage war. Foreign policy? I wage war. I wage war all the time.’xxxv18 November 1302: Boniface VIII triggers the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy: ‘Now I am living in France, in the Babylon of the West.’19 November 1863: Abraham Lincoln gives the Gettysburg Address: ‘… that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’20 November 1759: The British complete their Annus Mirabilis by defeating the French fleet at Quiberon Bay: ‘Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories.’21 November 1783: Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes make the first flight in a hot air balloon: ‘And what good is a new-born baby?’22 November 2005: Angela Merkel becomes Germany’s chancellor: ‘Always be more than you appear and never appear to be more than you are.’23 November 1407: Isabeau of Bavaria sends Louis, Duke of Orléans, from her bed to his death: ‘The devil tempted me.’24 November 1922: Erskine Childers is shot by an Irish Free State firing squad: ‘To feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing.’25 November 1947: Hollywood executives boycott the ‘Hollywood Ten’: ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’26 November 1504: The sombre death of Isabella I, Queen of Castile and Aragon: ‘Do not weep for me, nor waste your time in fruitless prayers for my recovery, but pray rather for the salvation of my soul.’27 November 1095: Pope Urban II calls for the First Crusade: ‘As for those who depart for this holy war, if they should perish, either during the journey on land, or crossing the seas, or fighting the idolaters, all their sins will be forgiven at that instant.’28 November 1938: Jiang Qing marries Mao Zedong: ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog. What he said to bite, I bit.’xxxvi29 November 1330: Roger Mortimer, once de facto ruler of England, is hanged at Tyburn: ‘It is better to eat the dog than be eaten by the dog.’30 November 1921: Serial killer Henri Désiré Landru is sentenced to death: ‘Monsieur le Curé, I am going to die and you’re playing guessing games.’1 December 1934: Sergei Kirov, head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, is murdered: ‘Death solves all problems – No man, no problem.’2 December 1851: Louis Napoleon stages a coup d’état: ‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.’3 December 1469: Florentines choose Lorenzo de’ Medici to rule Florence: ‘His eyes must always be open so that the others may sleep.’4 December 250 AD: Christian soldier Mercurius is martyred on orders from Emperor Decius: ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’.5 December 1484: Pope Innocent VIII issues the ‘Witch-Bull of 1484’: ‘Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi.’6 December 343 AD: Santa Claus dies in Turkey: ‘I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six.’7 December 43 BC: Cicero is executed: ‘At least make sure you cut my head off properly.’8 December 1793: Madame du Barry is guillotined: ‘She dishonoured the scaffold as she dishonoured the throne.’9 December 1868: William Gladstone is elected prime minister for the first of four terms: ‘I will back the masses against the classes.’10 December 1901: The first Nobel Prizes are given: ‘My dynamite will lead to peace sooner than a thousand world conventions.’xxxvii11 December 1936: Edward VIII abdicates for love: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King, as I wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love.’12 December 1901: Marconi sends the first transatlantic wireless transmission: ‘…’13 December 1250: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II dies: ‘Behold the beast that comes from the sea.’14 December 1861: Prince Albert dies of typhoid at Windsor Castle: ‘This German prince has governed England for twenty-one years with a wisdom and energy such as none of our kings have ever shown.’15 December 533 AD: Belisarius defeats the Vandals at the Battle of Tricamaron: ‘For not by numbers of men, nor by measure of body, but by valour of soul is war to be decided.’16 December 1969: Britain abolishes the death penalty: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’17 December 1903: The Wright brothers take their first flight: ‘A sudden dart when out about 100 feet from the end of the tracks ended the flight. Time about 12 seconds.’18 December 1620:Mayflower Pilgrims come ashore at Plymouth Harbor: ‘As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.’19 December 1562: Catholic forces defeat the Huguenots in the first battle of the French Wars of Religion: ‘Each one then stood firm, thinking in his heart that the men he saw coming towards him were not Spanish, English or Italian, but Frenchmen, and of the bravest, among whom were some of his own companions, kinsmen or friends.’20 December 69 AD: Roman Emperor Vitellius is executed, ending the Year of the Four Emperors: ‘Yet I was once your emperor.’xxxviii21 December 1940: F. Scott Fitzgerald dies: ‘First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.’22 December 1808: Beethoven stages a concert at the Theater an der Wien: ‘Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.’23 December 1588: Henri, duc de Guise is stabbed in the bedroom of King Henri III of France: ‘God grant you have not made yourself king of nothing.’24 December 1823: ‘A Visit from St Nicholas’: ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house/Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’25 December 800 AD: Charlemagne is crowned at St Peter’s: ‘Would that I had not entered St Peter’s on Christmas day.’26 December 1991: The USSR ceases to exist: ‘The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: by the grace of God, America won the Cold War.’27 December 537 AD: The Hagia Sophia in Constantinople is completed: ‘I have vanquished thee, O Solomon!’28 December 1895: The Lumière brothers make history’s first cinema screening: ‘This apparatus, a mere scientific curiosity, has no commercial future.’29 December 1170: Thomas Becket is murdered in Canterbury Cathedral: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’30 December 1916: Grigori Rasputin is cut down: ‘To get closer to God, you must commit many sins.’31 December 192 AD: Emperor Commodus is assassinated: ‘A befuddled drunkard shall not outwit a woman deadly sober.’IndexAbout the authorBy the same author, with Bruce CarrickCopyright

xxxix

Preface

This book is dedicated to the idea that history is a feast to be enjoyed every day and that memorable quotations are like glasses of fine Bordeaux that bring out the flavour of a three-star meal.

In this book, every date has a story from history, each headlined with a quotation related to that event. The text itself contains hundreds more quotes – in all, there are about 1,200. Even so, there are still dozens that I love but couldn’t find a way to include.

Some pose profound questions: in the 6th century Boethius queried: ‘If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?’ Others are more sceptical, like Alfonso the Wise of Castile in the 13th century: ‘Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.’ In the 19th century Lord Melbourne was simply dismissive: ‘Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is allowed to invade the sphere of private life.’

Many memorable quotations come from commanders in the field. In the 1st century BC, when the defenders of a besieged city cried outrage at being unlawfully attacked by the Romans, Pompey the Great told them: ‘Stop quoting laws, we carry weapons!’ In the early 19th century, Napoleonic marshal François Joseph Lefebvre told the inhabitants of a conquered town: ‘We come to give you liberty and equality, but don’t lose your heads about it – the first person who stirs without permission will be shot.’ And for pure bravado, little could beat American Marine General Chesty Puller’s dictum: ‘Pain is weakness leaving the body.’

Another of my favourites is ‘In vino veritas’ (‘In wine lies the truth’), but I was surprised to learn in researching it that originally it was coined in Greek by Alcaeus of Mytilene in the 6th century BC, that Pliny the Elder gave us the Latin version and numerous others have elaborated on it, like Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby – ‘Wine in, truth out’.

Another favourite is German statesman Otto von Bismarck’s answer, when asked what was the greatest political fact of modern times: ‘The inherited and permanent fact that North America speaks English.’

Political insult is another fertile field, including the perhaps apocryphal exchange in Parliament between John Wilkes and John Montagu. When Montagu told his adversary, ‘Sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox!’, Wilkes retorted: ‘That, sir, depends xl on whether I first embrace your Lordship’s principles or your Lordship’s mistresses.’

Another master of quotable insults was Winston Churchill. He attacked one Labour opponent, ‘An empty cab pulled up to Downing Street. Clement Attlee got out’, and had this to say about Stanley Baldwin: ‘He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.’ Less elegantly, former Democratic president Lyndon Johnson said this about Republican Gerald Ford, a noted athlete at university: ‘He’s a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off.’ The 19th‑century American senator Simon Cameron gave this acerbic view: ‘An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.’ The American writer P.J. O’Rourke would agree: ‘Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.’ And here is Lloyd George’s take: ‘A politician is a person with whose policies you don’t agree; if you agree with him he is a statesman.’ On a gentler note, Hillary Clinton once described her errant husband Bill as ‘a hard dog to keep on the porch’. One step removed from politics is royalty, and I particularly like Disraeli’s comment: ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when it comes to Royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.’

Then there are those quotations that simply make me smile, like movie mogul Louis B. Mayer’s telegram after screen-testing Ava Gardner: ‘She can’t sing, she can’t act, she can’t talk, she’s terrific!’ Or American senator Barry Goldwater’s comment about a verbose opponent: ‘Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.’ Or Mark Twain’s defence of Wagner: ‘Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.’

Clearly my choice of favourite quotations is erratic, but in defence I can only quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’

I could continue but I will stop, my final quotation from that unlucky French poet/philosopher Paul Valéry, who was nominated twelve times for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never won it. His comment on poetry could equally apply to my preface: ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’

W.B. Marsh, April 2020