The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty milit… - Michael Howard (historian)

Many Christians, of whom I am one, see no moral dilemma inherent in the possession, and if necessary the use, of nuclear weapons to deter their use against our own peoples by a Soviet state whose leaders are explicitly unconstrained by those considerations of "bourgeois morality" which so properly worry us. It is the initiation of the use of these weapons that causes so many of us such profound concern; and we have come to depend on that initiation because we have acquiesced in a decision to maintain a standard of living far higher than that of our adversaries, rather than provide the resources needed for a convincing defence by non-nuclear means of the territories of Western Europe.

The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, selecting evidence to conform to his views and ignoring all that does not. The abuse of history in fact lies less often in the motives of the historian than in his methods. It was after all the most honourable loyalties and affections which led Cardinal Gasquet to attempt the vindication of the monastic orders against the charges of Protestant historians; the formidable Coulton may have been inspired merely by acrimonious anti-Popish spite; but Coulton was an honest scholar, and Gasquet, one is forced to conclude, was not.

The system-builders, from Hegel to Toynbee, selected facts from history to prove an a priori thesis, and presented subjective works of art as objective statements of fact. But the old positivist belief in the possibility of a truly scientific and objective history is no longer held even by the most fanatical members of the Institute of Historical Research.