[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 revu… - Lewis Bernstein Namier

There is no-one alive engaged on history work with your experience of politics, government, and war. Please do not try to write history as other historians do, but do it in your own way. Tell us more how various transactions strike you, and what associations they evoke in your mind. When studying the detail of government at that distant period of almost 250 years ago, many comparisons must have occurred to you, which you seem to have suppressed. Too much history is written by don-bred dons with no knowledge or understanding of the practical problems of statecraft.

[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 Commons than the first two Reform Acts.

Whether the theory of an actual paternal origin of government is a correct phylogenetic or logical inference, or merely a psychological delusion, we shall probably never know; but this much is certain, that it is an assumption natural to us all. Correct perception of a psychological fact underlay Sir Robert Filmer's theory: all authority is to human beings paternal in character, for they are born, not free and independent as some of Filmer's opponents would have it, but subject to parental authority; in the first place, to that of their fathers.