Hubris is interesting, because you get people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great things, and then something goes wrong - they just don't know when to stop.
History belongs to everyone. I don't think you have to give up scholarly standards. But I also don't think you want to write something that is impenetrable. You try as hard as you can to be readable.
Many in the English-speaking world came to agree with the Germans that the Treaty of Versailles, and the reparations in particular, were unjust, and that Lloyd George had capitulated to the vengeful French.
An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.
Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.
War is a crucial, deeply ingrained part of human history. It has to be understood.
A lot of my father's family in Canada volunteered in the First World War because they saw it as a war that was defending the mother country.
I tend to think history is more a branch of literature than science.
Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.
I first read the 'Raj Quartet' in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott's decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.
When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.
We can prevent fighting by limiting weapons or finding nonviolent ways to end disputes.
I wish we could see understanding the First World War as a European issue, or even a global one, and not a nationalistic one.
Women are so much a part of war, even if they tend to see another side of it. To say they don't understand war is ridiculous.
In the 19th century, we didn't much like the loud annexationist voices south of the border or American support for Sinn Fein adventurers who thought, by seizing the Canadian colonies, they could force Britain out of Ireland.
In my view, Germany could and should have made reparations for its aggression in World War I - but was the risk of renewed war worth forcing it to do so?
Canadians see the Americans as cousins. We love the same sports: Canadians are crazy about baseball and basketball, and our beloved game of hockey is played all over the U.S.
It took a world war, between 1914 and 1918, to draw the United States into a deeper and more sustained relationship with the wider world.
The Italian futurists, the German expressionists, and the British vorticists were fascinated by speed and the ways the modern world was shattering conventions. The old ways of painting, writing, sculpting, and composing no longer seemed adequate to capture the world.
Exercising power can do strange things to people. You can become convinced that you're irreplaceable. You can become convinced that you're always right. And I think the danger is the longer you stay in power, the more likely that is to happen.
