Quotes from Andrew Roberts

If he lasts a year, he'll go far.' Talleyrand on Napoleon's consulship

There were light moments in response to hecklers. 'What would be the consequence if this seat were lost to Liberalism and to Free Trade?' he asked his audience rhetorically. When someone shouted out 'Beer!', Churchill immediately replied, 'That might be the cause. I am talking of the consequence.

Although the Soviet Union suffered over 90 per cent of the casualties of the Big Three Powers, Churchill did not want the Americans to behave as if Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship had some sort of moral equivalency with the Western democracies. Truman nonetheless went ahead and met Stalin privately.

Ultimately over half a million Germans died from aerial bombardment during the war, to Britain's 58,000.

They flew in the first plane to be specifically assigned to Churchill, an American-built, four-engined, Consolidated LB-30A based on the B-24 Liberator bomber and named Commando. William J. Vanderkloot, an American who had volunteered for the RAF before Pearl Harbor, was Churchill's personal pilot. The plane was bitterly cold and deafeningly

never an easy subordinate.

the village of Suomussalmi, in a ferociously brilliant Finnish operation that ranks with any of the Second World War. A logging, fishing and hunting community of 4,000 people before the war, it was captured by the 163rd (Tula) Motorized Rifle Division on 9 December, but was then cut off by the Finnish 9th Brigade under Colonel Hjalmar Siilasvuo.

We don't let them rest,' said General Kurt Wallenius of the Finnish Northern Army; 'we don't let them sleep. This is a war of numbers against brains.

Above all, he was the first significant political figure to spot the twin totalitarian dangers of Communism and Nazism, and to point out the best ways of dealing with both.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs

To reduce the desperately difficult moral decisions that Churchill and many others had to take to the level of accusations of deliberate genocide is biased and unhistorical.

By 5 January, a thousand Russian prisoners had been taken, a further 700 soldiers had escaped back to the Russian lines, and over 27,000 had been killed, all for the loss of 900 Finns.

His unpunctuality was to be a lifelong trait; even as prime minister he would arrive late or with only minutes to spare for meetings with Cabinets and monarchs and for debates in Parliament. As his exasperated wife was to say, 'Winston always likes to give the train a sporting chance to get away.'47

Hitler in particular believed he learnt lessons about the performance of the Red Army that were to affect his decision to invade Russia the following year. Yet they were substantially the wrong ones.

total, around 43,000 officers were killed or imprisoned, although 20,000 were later released.

am in favour of government of the people, for the people, but not by the people

THE STORM OF WAR A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Never confuse leadership with popularity.

Alan Turing installed something known as a bombe machine, an electro-mechanical device which made hundreds

March 1935, the same month that Germany publicly repudiated the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty, clauses that she had been secretly ignoring ever since Hitler had come to power. That September the Nuremberg laws effectively outlawed German Jews, and made the Swastika the official flag of Germany.

If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time.

Thermidorian reaction', led by Barras and Fréron, overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar). Both brothers and sixty other 'Terrorists' were guillotined the next day. Had Napoleon been in Paris at the time he might well have been scooped up and sent to the guillotine along with them.

He trusted that they would be enabled to further the progress already made in rebuilding the domestic stability and economic strength of the United Kingdom and in weaving still more closely the threads which bound together the countries of the Commonwealth, or, as he still preferred to call it, the Empire.'183