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The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas - fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.

The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war.

The war changed everybody's attitude. We became international almost overnight.

Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.

World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.