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July 22 - July 25, 2023
‘Calamity,’ as Han Fei Tzu warned his monarch in second-century BC China, ‘will come to you from those you love.’
‘Men make their own history,’ wrote Marx, ‘but they don’t make it as they please; they don’t make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’
‘Nobody’s more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.’
The first rule of history is to realize how little we know about people in the past, how they thought, how their families worked.
In west Asia, the Sargon family illustrated a paradox of empire. The bigger it grew, the more borders had to be defended; the richer it was, the more tempting a target it became for less settled neighbours – and the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds.
it is one of the ironies of power that kings of the world struggle to cope with their own children.
religions and peoples are formed by shared experiences of suffering, lived and relived as inherited stories.
A basic rule of power is: mock anyone, but never your bodyguards.
Accustomed to being a divine ruler, Constantine ranked himself high on the hierarchy between God and man, seeing himself as the thirteenth apostle.
His conversion made Christianity as attractive and powerful as the Roman empire itself: power is always the lodestar of faith.
‘Don’t make friends with an elephant keeper if you have no room to entertain an elephant.’
In any other era he might have been a village official, but in times of extreme opportunity, extreme characters thrive.
The most extraordinary thing about Henry V was that he was alive at all. When he was sixteen, fighting with his father against a rebel nobleman, he was hit in the face by an arrow that entered below his eye and lodged in the back of the neck – without touching his brain. Usually this would have led to death from infection and most physicians would simply have pulled the arrow out through the face, tearing the flesh inside. An initial team of doctors – later described as ‘lewd chattering leeches’ – bungled this, breaking off the arrow. But the royal doctor, John Bradmore, a brilliant man, was
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a small but determined clique of self-righteous, self-selected extremists can dominate a society, rewarding their supporters with spoils and destroying those deemed unvirtuous
So often in politics the greatest peril lies within not without, and nothing surpasses the intimate loathings of family.
Royalty can never trust their own families; they have to make their own.
The Native American was touching on the essence of western freedom: much of it was – and is – theoretical since most people were actually bound by their place in society.
In 1736, one of the best letter writers, Prince Frederick, wrote a letter to another virtuoso epistolarian, Voltaire, who recognized his correspondent’s rare character but also like all writers lost his mind as soon as he was flattered by a leader.
he retorted. ‘Mr Chairman, I stand astonished at my own moderation.’ No one else was astonished by it.
Antoinette feared it was another daughter until the king said, ‘Monseiur le Dauphin requests permission to enter!’
Strong states are not undermined by trivialities, but scandal can destroy a weak regime as fast as gunpowder.
‘Oppressed people…often develop their own internal narratives…contemptuous of their overlords,’ writes Annette Gordon-Reed,
Most politicians struggle to differentiate between their own interests and those of the state, but dictators believe the two are identical.
‘They treat me like a fox,’ Bismarck said later. ‘A cunning fellow of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to deal with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half.’
The smaller world made news more urgent:
Their relationship was like a stormy twenty-six-year marriage, interspersed with Bismarckian spasms of shouting, weeping and threats of resignation. ‘It’s not easy,’ joked Wilhelm later, ‘to be kaiser under Bismarck.’ This solitary, indefatigable giant was manic, petty, paranoid and vindictive – but the dynamic executor of plans that were the fruit of brutally clear analysis of the alchemy of power.
The refrigerator so improved nutrition that in the next decades the height of the average American increased by 5.1 per cent.
a sinking power is more dangerous than a rising one,
No one senses the weakness of others as acutely as the man who fears his own.
his visionary impatience dovetailed with brutal intolerance.
