Academia Quote by Lauren Willig

Just to show you how little reliance can be placed even on what are supposed the best accounts of a battle, I mention that…

— Duke of Wellington

“Yet historians still start their books with a ritual lament about 'the sources' and their inadequacy. The lament is not entirely insincere (though it…

— Mary Beard

There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin…

— Lloyd deMause

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

— Celia Green

“Battles (as soldiers know, and newspaper editors do not) are usually fought, not as they ought to be fought, but as they can be…

— Charles Kingsley

An illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it…

— Edith Hall

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in…

— William S. Paley

It was a little skirmish across a century.

— Margery Allingham

“Fortunately—for the purposes of this study but not for those involved, for it was a bloody affair—the battle was fought all over again fifteen…

— R.A. Lafferty

“The history of science is the back-and-forth movement of trial-and-error advances and retreats, punctuated by moments of brilliance and marred by periods of excess.”

— Robert A. Burton

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

— Michael Ondaatje

“These muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had to try and unravel once time trouble was discovered and battles started pre-erupting…

— Douglas Adams