“In 1891, a 16-year-old Winston Churchill had a prophetic conversation with his schoolmate. Asked if he would ever go into politics, Churchill replied: ‘Well, I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger — London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London.’”

The Culture Critic Nov. 16, 2024 [https://www.culture-critic.com/p/truth-about-churchill]

“the tide had ebbed as well as flowed: the occasional Bishop, caught out by an abrupt reversal of royal policy, had been forced to flee; the occasional king, cut down by a pagan rival, had been ritually dismembered. Nevertheless, by the time of Theodore’s arrival in Canterbury [668 AD], a majority of the Saxon and Anglian elites had tested the Christian god to their satisfaction. Like a sparrow flying swiftly through a hall and out again, into the storms of winter, so the brief life of man had seemed to these lords. ‘For of what went before it or what comes after, we know nothing. Therefore, if these new teachings can inform us more fully, it seems only right that we should follow them.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Terminos propriae potestatis egressus in aliam messem perperam mittit falcem suam.”

“*[Ed.: He who wanders outside the boundaries of his own ability wrongly puts his sickle into another’s harvest.]”

2nd of 2 epigrams on the title page of “The Fourth Part of the Institutes” in The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke Volume II [also expressed by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callaghan as “A man’s got to know his limitations”].

“Germany, which had been united as recently as 1871 and within one generation had become an awesome industrial and military power, was, on the eve of war [World War I], the foremost representative of innovation and renewal. She was, among nations, the very embodiment of vitalism and technical brilliance. The war for her was to be war of liberation, a Befreiungskrieg, from the hypocrisy of bourgeois form and convenience, and Britain was to her the principal representative of the order against which she was rebelling. Britain was in fact the major conservative power of the fin-de-siècle world.”

Author’s “Preface” in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“But perhaps the most important influence in the development of a vision of social order based on commonly accepted values was the growth of Protestantism and of Bible reading [in Britain], especially in the wake of the great revival in the early nineteenth century. By the end of that century a shared vision of social order was widely in place. This vision and its accompanying values were not imposed through social imperialism but grew out of the religious environment and, where this did not suffice, out of improved economic and social conditions. It is generally accepted that by the end of the Victorian era, most of the British population no longer had to struggle simply to subsist. A measure of comfort, however small, had been achieved in most cases. Consumption of meat instead of bread, of milk and eggs instead of just potatoes, was rising. In recent years, before the turn of the century, there had been a steady rise in real wages, a decline in family size, a drop in the consumption of alcohol, and the beginnings of social welfare provisions. Archdeacon Wilson, headmaster of Clifton College, remarked in the speech to the Working Men’s Club of St. Agnes in 1893: ‘Possibly a future historian writing the history of the English people in this period will think much less of the legislative and even of the commercial and scientific progress of the period than of the remarkable social movement by which there has been an effort made, by a thousand agencies, to bring about unity of feeling between different classes, and to wage war against conditions of life which earlier generations seem to have tolerated.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“As long as I can look myself in the mirror and know that I am working as hard as I can, doing what I believe is right for the country, that is how I get through, and that is what I believe I am doing.”

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the end of a frenetic and disastrous electoral campaign, quoted in National Post July 4, 2024 [he also said he had a “clear conscience” so the fact that the election was a disaster for him, his party and his nation apparently did nothing to dent the fact that he felt splendid about himself]

In 1914 “Germany threatened not only Britain’s military and economic position in the world but the whole moral basis of the Pax Britannia, which, as the British argued, had given the world a century of peace, and respite from general European war not enjoyed since the Rome of the Antonines. The British mission, whether in the wider world, the empire, or at home among her own populace, was principally one of extending the sense of civic virtue, of teaching both the foreigner and the uneducated Britain the rules of civilized social conduct, the rules for ‘playing the game.’ The British mission was to introduce ‘lesser breeds,’ to use Kipling’s words, to ‘the law.’ Civilization and law, then, were virtually synonymous. Civilization was possible only if one played the game according to rules laid down by time, history, precedent, all of which amounted to the law. Civilization was a question of objective values, of external form, of behavior rather than sentiment, of duty rather than whim. ‘It is only civilized beings who can combine,’ wrote J.S. Mill in his essay ‘Civilization.’ ‘All combination is compromise: it is the sacrifice of some portion of individual will for a common purpose. The savage cannot bear to sacrifice, for any purpose, the satisfaction of his individual will.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Business is taboo at the dinner table, but crime and criminals aren’t, and the Rosenberg case hogged the conversation all through the anchovy fritters, partridge in casserole with no olives in the sauce, cucumber mousse, and Creole curds and cream. Of course it was academic, since the Rosenbergs had been dead for years, but the young princes had been dead for five centuries, and [Nero] Wolfe had once spent a week investigating that case, after which he removed More’s Utopia from his bookshelves because More had framed Richard III.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy; Wolfe had been reading Invitation to an Inquest and had ordered a transcript of the trial.