[O]n a careful inquiry it will be found that the coming in of American wheat has wrought a greater change in the composition of the British House of … - Lewis Bernstein Namier

I have always maintained that British history in the eighteenth century is primarily a history of country houses.

The League was to cure humanity and lead it into better ways. It was an expression of the morality and idealism of the Anglo-Saxons, and of their ignorance of what it means to suffer of neighbours and disputed borderlands (Ulster alone knows it).

Before the war the manor-houses on the big landed estates were centres of high culture and mainstays of modern economic life in Eastern Europe. They resembled Roman villas in semi-barbaric lands. Their inhabitants read the works and thought the thoughts of the most advanced civilisation in the midst of an illiterate peasantry.