“The Welfare State, South Africa – and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.”

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Evil is a form of incompetence.

Take any important issue of our time – Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race,

A nation’s sense of its history is indistinguishable from its social cohesion.

Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law.

The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.

Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive.

But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade.

History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past.

Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature.

Hitler had a plausible case to argue when he claimed that the Anschluss was only the application of the Wilsonian principle of self-determination.

If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation.