The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make

If you smash a city when you're trying to capture it, you actually end up providing the perfect terrain for the defenders while blocking the access for your own armoured vehicles.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall.

I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.

I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis

I joined the Army in 1965 and served with the 11th Hussars, which I loved. The regiment was so relaxed - a salute was more like a friendly wave.

The duty of a historian is simply to understand and then convey that understanding, no more than that.

I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does.

The British bombing of Caen beginning on D-Day in particular was stupid, counter-productive and above all very close to a war crime.

I was feeling like I was floating two inches above the sidewalk every step of the way. Feeling, almost, a magnetic pull back towards her and I wondered at all, if she felt it too.

I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed

Hey, rock dude, are you destroying the house? Causing mayhem? Who’s a ferocious gargoyle? Stoney’s a ferocious gargoyle.

I feel my temperature rising. Help me, I'm flaming, I must be a hundred and nine.

Certainly there's got to be a little bit of reality show fatigue happening.

Super Junior is not a group who will extinct in two or three years. We will always be with E.L.F. for 20 or 30 years until E.L.F. doesn't need us again.

In life beauty perishes, but not in art.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

Every picture of you is when you were younger.

The book [Manufacturing Consent] itself is then devoted to a series of case studies, selected, we hope [with Edward Herman], to offer a fair and in fact rather severe test of those conclusions.