States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by bl… - Lewis Bernstein Namier

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

The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organised communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history. The conflicting territorial claims of communities constitute the greater part of conscious international history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious part of the domestic history of nations—and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. To every man, as to Brutus, the native land is his life-giving Mother, and the State raised upon the land his law-giving Father... There is some well-nigh mystic power in the ownership of space—for it is not the command of resources alone which makes the strength of the landowner, but that he had a place in the world which he can call his own, from which he can ward off strangers, and in which he himself is rooted—the superiority of a tree to a log. In land alone can there be real patrimony, and he who as freeman holds a share in his native land—the freeholder—is, and must be, a citizen.

[T]he German scene was transformed by the entry of Hitler: never before had a man so malignant attained such power, nor a nation shown so little revulsion from evil. Crude and hysterical, full of virulent hatreds and envy, he powerfully appealed to the Germans, and set about doing their work in Europe... Hitler had shrewd skill, but no wisdom; with him there was no appealing to reason or even to rational interests—which men like Chamberlain were slow to grasp. Nor was there in him a conscious control of his own moves; hence he appeared incalculable and chaotic.