The creeping crisis of confidence in Empire had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for its victory over Germany in the First World War… - Niall Ferguson

The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.

Bush was in many ways the maestro president when it came to foreign policy. With extraordinary dexterity, he handled the , the collapse of all the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, German reunification and then the Soviet disintegration. On his watch, Nelson Mandela was set free and apartheid consigned to the history books; and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was reversed. And yet still the presidency was won by a scandal-prone Southern governor with the banal but brilliant slogan: "It’s the economy, stupid."

Was there something distinctive about American civil society that gave democracy a better chance than in France, as Tocqueville argued? Was the already centralized French state more likely to produce a Napoleon than the decentralized United States? We cannot be sure. But it is not unreasonable to ask how long the US constitution would have lasted if the United States had suffered the same military and economic strains that swept away the French constitution of 1791.