Napoleon was a tyrant quite as abominable as Hitler; and the fact that he did not kill quite so many people is due merely to purely technical deficie… - Richard Cobb

The book reminds us that 1789, far from being a year of hope and unity, was one already of intense disunity, and already produced features of the revolutionary years both in Paris and in the provinces: wild murders, lynchings, and decapitated heads placed on pikes.

One should at least be grateful to Mr Crossman for having reminded us that what socialism is about is coercion.

But my own greatest debt to the Duke was the discovery of Namier. Now here was a level of history the existence of which I had never previously suspected. I was absolutely enthralled by his use of the minutiae of personal case histories, and it seemed to me that he was a historian who was writing about real people, about human beings and not just about Heroes, great principles, ideas, and that sort of thing. I was delighted above all in his portrayal of the great Duke of Newcastle, for me the very quintessence of the anti-hero, a personage of delightfully unglorious proportions.