A History of Britain in Ten Enemies Quotes

“As the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said: ‘A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.’ In the history books of the world, the cigarette and its depredations have been ignored, yet it killed every British monarch who died in the twentieth century.”
― Terry Deary, A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

“inspector? Not all bad, then. The Vikings raided Britannia on holy days when they knew the towns would be full of pilgrims, women and children going to church. These unarmed people would be snatched and sold as slaves as far away as North Africa. For balance, I have to point out that the Saxons weren’t a lot better. The Church objected to Christians like themselves being sold as slaves; they didn’t object to other people being made slaves.”
― Terry Deary, A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

“The Roman Empire had departed Britain, leaving very little behind apart from the odd straight road and bits of walls that would give archaeologists a meagre living for a millennium and a half. They came back in an unexpected way, as the Catholic Church. This was the ultimate irony because the ancient Romans had tortured and killed Christians for sport.”
― Terry Deary, A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

“Some corpses were now chargrilled – or, as more PC people prefer to call it, cremated.”
― Terry Deary, A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

“As the brutal battle reached its climax, the enemy troops surrendered or retreated. A wounded German soldier limped out of the trench and into Private Tandey’s line of fire. The exhausted German soldier didn’t even raise his rifle. He simply stared at Tandey and waited to be shot. That’s when Tandey’s sporting ‘Vitai Lampada’ instinct kicked in. Shoot a helpless man? Not cricket, old boy. Henry Tandey in his own words later stated: ‘I took aim but couldn’t shoot a wounded man, so I let him go.’fn2 The young German soldier nodded a silent ‘Danke’ and retreated to safety as fast as his twenty-nine-year-old legs would carry him. The lucky German ended up back in Germany, where he languished in the humiliation of defeat. He began to campaign for a resurgence in German power. Revenge, in fact. He had a passionate hatred of the ‘traitors’ in Germany who had cost them the war. He especially blamed Jewish people for supposedly being responsible for Germany’s surrender. He later said: ‘We are going to destroy the Jews. They are not going to get away with what they did on 9 November 1918. The day of reckoning has come.’ When he saw a newspaper cutting showing Tandey being awarded the Victoria Cross, he said: ‘That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again. Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.’ The name of the German was, you’ll have guessed, Adolf Hitler. The bullet that Gavrilo Princip fired to start the First World War led to millions of deaths. The bullet Tandey didn’t fire at Hitler caused countless millions more.”
― Terry Deary, A History of Britain in Ten Enemies