The greatest volume of any single product traded internationally in western Europe during the medieval period.

In the period 1305-36, when the city [Bordeaux] was prosperous under English occupation, it is estimated that wine exports from Gascony to England and Flanders reached 750,000 hectolitres a year. This represents the greatest volume of any single product traded internationally in western Europe during the medieval period.

B. Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean (2001), 51

Hernando Cortez cannot be true

I wrote my Mexico book out of incredulity. Hernando Cortez cannot be true. There cannot have been a human being so brave, charismatic, obstinate and apparently indestructible. How could anyone be so greedy, fanatical, and unimaginative as to lead a few hundred men into an alien continent of whose topography he was ignorant, swarming with a race devoted to the slaughter and sacrifice of strangers, in order to take prisoner their their leader in his own capital city? And succeed. And then, when the tables are turned and he is driven out, set to and build thirteen vessels of war and carry them back one hundred and forty miles across mountains because the only way you can tackle a city sited in the middle of a lake is with superior shipping.And succeed again. Is a man who is impelled to do such things a hero or a maniac?

P.Lively, Moon tiger (1987)

War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It's had a disgracefully good press.

'Are we going to win the war?' asks Claudia.

'Yes. I assume so. Not because of the lord's intervention or because justice will prevail but because in the last resort we have greater resources. Wars have little to do with justice.Or valour or sacrifice or the other things traditionally associated with them. That's one thing I hadn't quite realised. War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It's had a disgracefully good press. I hope you and your friends are doing something to put that right.' 

P. Lively, Moon Tiger (1987), 102-3

More like a war fought at sea than on land

He had been up at the front and he'd be going back there next week. Or wherever the front by then was - that indeterminate confusion of minefields and dispositions of vehicles in the empty neutral sand. He once described it to me as more like a war fought at sea than on land, a sequence of advances and retreats in which the participants related only to each other and barely at all to the landscape across which they moved. A war in which there was nothing to get in the way  - no towns, no villages, no people - and nothing tangible to  gain or lose.

P. Lively, Moon Tiger (1987), 72-73

That war [WW2] seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice.

Yates's stories and novels return repeatedly to the weakness and hysterical anxiety of mid-twentieth-century American masculinity. His fiction, begun in the early 1950s, and written throughout the next four decades, was closely shadowed by the Second Word War. For Yates. that war seems to have functioned like an impossibly stern father: no performance would ever suffice. If you fought in it, you never fought bravely enough (Yates was anxious about the bravery of his own conduct in the Seventy-Fifth Division, in Europe); if you missed it, the rest of your life would be perforated with inadequacies.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 201

The novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people

There are large contradictions here. One is that the great historiographical sceptic is also the great sermonising bully, not only telling us what we must think, but clearly writing a form of history … Second the novelist who sermonises about the ‘swarmlike’ life of men is the novelist who, by and large, never writes about ordinary people. Thirdly, theologically speaking War and Peace, for all its radical unconventionality, looks more and more like that characteristically vague growl of nineteenth-century doubt, in which God is no longer describable but impossible to abandon.

J. Wood, The fun stuff  (2013), 152

And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?

'And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?'

'Just in the nick of time. She's slipped the rope around her neck and he's got hold of two pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all it was an accident. He didn't know the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper... And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was to stop being married. The stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everyone had to die of a virus - all that was just nonsense just made up by a  lot of poor stupid people who din't know any better.'

A. Huxley, Island (1962), 253