In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball … - G. M. Trevelyan

Against Machiavelli's princely interpretation of the new nationalism, Britain alone of the great national States successfully held out, turned back the tide of despotism, and elaborated a system by which a debating club of elected persons could successfully govern an Empire in peace and in war.

Linguistic ignorance and racial isolation are our greatest national dangers in the new era opened out by the War. We can no longer stand apart from Europe if we would. Yet we are untrained to mix with our neighbours, or even talk to them. Foreign policy is merely an outcome of our other international relations, and can only give official expression to our national ignorance or our national understanding of other races. The League of Nations is not a substitute for mutual understanding; rather it assumes that such understanding exists, and if that cannot soon be brought into existence, the League will fail, and with it the hopes of mankind.

[I]f the lesson of Marlborough's genius at Blenheim had been taught in vain to those in Holland and Germany who refused to learn, it had its full effect in our island. Bishop Burnet was not the only man whose "heart was so charged with joy he could not sleep" on the night when the news came through. In manor house, farm and workshop a race of country-folk, who commonly heard and thought about little save their own quiet occupations, were stirred by the strange tidings from the Danube, which opened wider vistas to the imagination, recalled fireside talk of King Harry at Agincourt and Queen Bess at Tilbury, and pointed forward to a future of illimitable magnitude for their country and their children, dimly descried like the sun rising behind the midst.