Quotes from Alistair Horne

A triumph in which Kissinger could claim to have played some little part, in the presidential elections that November, President Richard Nixon had won the second greatest landslide in American history. Forty-seven million Americans had voted for him - and for his and Kissinger's policies - representing more than 60 percent of all the votes cast.

After 1945, shamefully, we Brits seemed dedicated to punishing the heroic Poles at every turn for their wartime loyalty.

Mikheil Saakashvili can claim that 80 per cent of Georgians wanted to join NATO; on the other hand, a similar percentage of Russians would almost certainly support Putin's quest for a strong Russia. We would mistake this mood at our peril.

A supreme pragmatist, Kissinger was never interested in the art of the impossible - and nor, as a biographer, am I. That is why, having initially been invited to write his entire official biography, I eventually decided to devote myself to writing just one year in his life: 1973.

Christmas 1972 was a lonely time for Kissinger, as well as for his boss, and a period of serious reflection. Kissinger was then a bachelor, enamored of the tall, elegant, but elusive WASP Nancy Maginnes, but still very much a bachelor - Washington's most sought-after bachelor.

Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.

In the fall of 1973, Erica Jong assaulted the last surviving bastions of old-fashioned modesty with her 'Fear of Flying.'

peoples who have been waiting for their independence for a century, fighting for it for a generation, can afford to sit out a presidential term, or a year or two in the life of an old man in a hurry;

I would suddenly be seized with a desire to go down to the beach for a swim. And merely to have imagined the sound of ripples at my feet, and then the smooth feel of the water on my body as I struck out, and the wonderful sensation of relief it gave

One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!

disposal of the "inconvenient"

De Gaulle at his iciest had reproached Challe: "One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!

We shall not have the Algerians with us, if they do not want that themselves.... The era of the European administration of the indigenous peoples has run its course.

Qu'importe si cent mille coups de fusil partent en Afrique! L'Europe ne les entend pas. Louis-Philippe, 1835

The moment despair is alone, pure, sure of itself, pitiless in its consequences, it has a merciless power. Albert Camus

Monsieur le Gouverneur-Général, you reason in the French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria." It was not at all the same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order to understand events from 1954 onwards it is necessary to accept the existence of three totally distinct peoples — the French of France, the French of Algeria, and the Muslims of Algeria.

the prosperity gap between very rich and very poor in France was less than that between the handful of most affluent grands colons of Algeria and the petit blanc; while between the latter and his Muslim competitor, the differential was, in contrast, extremely slender.

In this admirable country in which a spring without equal covers it with flowers and its light, men are suffering hunger and demanding justice. Albert Camus, 1958

Myself, and the majority of officers in a position of command, will not execute unconditionally the orders of the Head of State.

One of my earliest surprises in Algiers was that in the Casbah, where the highly emotive Battle of Algiers had been waged against Massu's paras, there is not the smallest plaque or commemoration to indicate where such heroes of the Revolution as Ali la Pointe fought and died; and often it is hard to find residents who can guide or inform you, even though little more than a decade has elapsed.

ingeniously left a forty-mile gap in the

The history of France, a permanent miracle," says André Maurois at the end of his Histoire de la France, "has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels.

Consulting de Gaulle whether he should be present at the flag-lowering ceremony or not, Fouchet after a pause of several seconds had been told simply: "Je crois que ça serait inutile....

Back in another untroubled summer, that of 1870, the British foreign secretary Lord Granville, gazing up from Whitehall, could detect "not a cloud in the sky." Yet a month later, Europe would be torn asunder by the Franco-Prussian War, marking the end of a century of Pax Britannica and all its optimistic assumptions.