Our task as historians is to make past conflicts live again; not to lament the verdict or to wish for a different one. It bewildered me when my old master A. F. Pribram, a very great historian, said in the nineteen-thirties: 'It is still not decided ...
Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.
