History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

Like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

Taylor's Law states: 'The Foreign Office knows no secrets.'

In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the tradi…