Barbara Tuchman

To the anonymous reviewer of George F. Kennan's book, Russia Leaves the War, who wrote in the Times Literary Supplement (London), January 4, 1957, this sentence: "We still do not know at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful decision to bring the United States into the First World War," I would like to say hello.

[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.

Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.