Occupation: Journalist Birth: November 2, 1928
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us ….
...the century's most radical vice... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete..
Wisdom lies not in possessing knowledge - which quickly becomes outdated - but in perpetually seeking it..
Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very crit….
If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism, it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculia….
His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest ….
I very much wanted to be editor of the 'New Statesman!' But I never wanted to be prime minister, except maybe as a little boy..
John Major is what he is: a man from nowhere, going nowhere, heading for a well-merited obscurity as fast as his mediocre talents can carry him..
I don't write huge books any more. I used to write 1,000 printed pages, but now I write short books. I did one on Napoleon, 50,000 words - enjoyed do….
To many, Heathrow in August is a paradigm of Hell..
I was very fond of Princess Diana. She used to have me over to lunch to ask my advice. I'd give her good advice, and she'd say: 'I entirely agree. Pa….
Democracy has many enemies, and the terrorist is only one of them..
The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell..
A Stalin functionary admitted, Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people were arrested only for spec….
In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world , and it is ….
Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it..
The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family..
My grandfather used to say, "Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad". It is t….
The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popul….
If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativi….
Bismarck had cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups ….