John Keegan · 352 pages
Rating: (5.6K votes)
“Visually Agincourt is a pre-Raphaelite, perhaps better a Medici Gallery print battle - a composition of strong verticals and horizontals and a conflict of rich dark reds and Lincoln greens against fishscale greys and arctic blues.”
― John Keegan, quote from The Face Of Battle: A Study Of Agincourt, Waterloo And The Somme
“One of Picton's officers fell asleep the instant the halt was sounded and did not think of food until later in the night, when he woke to eat some chops cooked in the breastplate of a dead cuirassier (meat fried in a breastplate was very much à la mode in the Waterloo campaign, rather as rats spitted on a bayonet were to be in 1871 or champagne exhumed from chateau gardens in 1914).”
― John Keegan, quote from The Face Of Battle: A Study Of Agincourt, Waterloo And The Somme
“common soldier must fear his officer more than the enemy’: Frederick the Great)”
― John Keegan, quote from The Face Of Battle: A Study Of Agincourt, Waterloo And The Somme
“Rundstedt, revered throughout the German regular officer corps as its last archetypal Prussian, refused to deal with detail or to look at small-scale maps, as if the fighting itself were distasteful to him, but spent his days reading detective stories and thrice resigned his command.”
― John Keegan, quote from The Face Of Battle: A Study Of Agincourt, Waterloo And The Somme
“There cannot be any hard and fast rules. But there can be suggestions and useful analogies. The most useful, to my mind, is that of the difference between the English and French judicial systems. In England (and America), the task of the court in criminal cases, which it devolves upon a jury, is to arrive at a verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on the evidence presented by prosecuting and defending counsel in turns. Trials are conflicts and verdicts are decisions; the two sides ‘win’ or ‘lose’. In France, and other countries which observe Roman Law, the task of the court in a criminal case is to arrive at the truth, as far as it can be perceived by human eyes, and the business of establishing the outlines of the truth falls not on a jury, which is strictly asked to enter a judgement, but upon a juge d’instruction. This officer of the court, unknown to English law, is accorded very wide powers of interrogation–of the suspect, his family, his associates–and of investigation–of the circumstances and scene of the crime–at which the suspect is often required to participate in a reconstruction. Only when the juge is satisfied that a crime has indeed occurred and that the suspect is responsible will he allow the case to go forward for prosecution. The character of these two different legal approaches is usually defined as ‘accusatorial’ (English) and ‘inquisitorial’ (French) respectively.”
― John Keegan, quote from The Face Of Battle: A Study Of Agincourt, Waterloo And The Somme
John Keegan
Born place: in Clapham, London, The United Kingdom
Born date May 15, 1934
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“To achieve the height of holiness, people must realize that all they count as trivial and worthless is what can make them holy.”
― quote from Abandonment to Divine Providence: The Classic Text with a Spiritual Commentary
“Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.”
I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?”
“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy’ and ‘good’ will never find her.”
“You don’t want her to be happy and good?”
“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, quote from White is for Witching
“Susie . . . ” With his hands on her face, he found her eyes. “If you make love with me and then go back to him, you’ll ruin me".”
― Marie Force, quote from Line of Scrimmage
“I have never wanted someone so badly before, mentally and physically, that I was afraid my body might act without any instructions from me.”
― Karina Halle, quote from Dead Sky Morning
“Shakespeare’s lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.”
― Arthur Phillips, quote from The Tragedy of Arthur
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