Halifax Quotes

All happened so damn fast,” he said. “’Phone call here after she arrived. Her mom and dad were just after leaving Halifax…ten cars, twelve maybe, made it onto the CBC News.

Monday 29 January 1821 [Halifax] I love and only love the fairer sex and thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any love but theirs.

Saturday 12 July 1823 [Halifax] Could not sleep last night. Dozing, hot & disturbed ... a violent longing for a female companion came over me. Never remember feeling it so painfully before ... It was absolute pain to me.

Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.

Friday 22 June 1821 [Halifax] I owe a good deal to this journal. By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, in some degree to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past & present and thus to cheer & edify the future.

If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls." Czechoslovakian foreign minister Jan Masaryk to Lord Halifax as reaction to announcement of allies' betrayal in 1938.

This stuff of a past not worthily lived is also medicine.

In being with dying, we arrive at a natural crucible of what it means to love and be loved. And we can ask ourselves this: Knowing that death is inevitable, what is most precious today?

All beings, including each one of us, enemy and friend alike, exist in patterns of mutuality, interconnectedness, co-responsibility and ultimately in unity.

Within and around the earth, within and around the hills, within and around the mountains your authority returns to you.

Conceptual knowledge is so valued in our world. Yet in many cultures wisdom is equated not with knowledge but with an open heart. And

Everybody has a geography that can be used for change that is why we travel to far off places. Whether we know it or not we need to renew ourselves in territories that are fresh and wild. We need to come home through the body of alien lands.

Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.

I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present

Nowhere to go, nothing to do … Lost and found in the moment … Just practice this … Maybe here is where we find wholeheartedness and our true freedom.

My mother took the train to Halifax to see my father off. It was crammed with men en route to the Front; she could not get a sleeper, so she travelled sitting up. There were feet in the aisles, and bundles, and spittoons; coughing, snoring - drunken snoring, no doubt. As she looked at the boyish faces around her, the war became real to her, not as an idea but as a physical presence.

[It] was the first time in my life I ever knew the meaning of that rare thing, tenderness. A quality different from kindliness, affectionateness, or benevolence; a quality which can exist only in strong, deep, and undemonstrative natures, and therefore in its perfection is oftenest found in men.

Life-threatening illness calls us to a place—metaphorically a desert or mountain peak—where, as we sit, the hard wind of reality strips away all the trappings of life, like so much clothing, makeup, and accessories.

A world without empathy is a world that is dead to others—and if we are dead to others, we are dead to ourselves. The sharing of another’s pain can take us past the narrow canyon of selfish disregard, and even cruelty, and into the larger, more expansive landscape of wisdom and compassion.

Malice is a greater magnifying-glass than kindness.

Service is the rent that we pay for our room on earth.

Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was to his boss. The last words he’d spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate clichés, seared horribly into memory. “Let’s touch base with Nancy,” he remembered saying, “and then we should reach out to Bob and circle back next week. I’ll shoot Larry an email.

Formality is sufficiently revenged upon the world for being so unreasonably laughed at; it is destroyed, it is true, but it hath the spiteful satisfaction of seeing everything destroyed with it.

Denial of death runs rampant through our culture, leaving us woefully unprepared when it is our time to die, or our time to help others die. We often aren’t available for those who need us, paralyzed as we are by anxiety and resistance—nor are we available for ourselves.

We live in a culture that celebrates activity. We collapse our sense of who we are into what we do for a living. The public performance of busyness is how we demonstrate to one another that we are important. The more people see us as tired, exhausted, over-stretched, the more they think we must be somehow … indispensable. That we matter.

Listening to the testimony of a dying person or a grieving family member can serve the one speaking; it all depends on how we listen. Maybe we can reflect back the words and feelings in such a way that the speaker can at last really hear what he’s said.

War is Man’s greatest fall from grace, of course, especially perhaps when we feel a moral imperative to fight it and find ourselves twisted into ethical knots. We can never doubt (ever) the courage of those men in the Halifaxes and Stirlings and Lancasters but the bombing war was undoubtedly a brutish affair, a crude method employing a blunt weapon, continually hampered by the weather and lack of technology (despite massive advances that war always precipitates). The large gap between what was claimed for the results of the bombing campaign and what was actually achieved was never fully understood at the time, and certainly not, I suspect, by those men flying the bombers.

It doesn't matter now that they lived and died, but rather did they make a difference?

Folly is often more cruel in the consequence, than malice can be in the intent.

action, calls us to turn or return to the world with

The secret of life,” say the Utes, “is in the shadows and not in the open sun; to see anything at all, you must look deeply into the shadow of a living thing.

the way out of the storm and mud of suffering, the way back to freedom on the high edge of strength and courage, is through the power of compassion.

The second tenet, bearing witness, calls us to be present with the suffering and joy in the world, as it is, without judgment or any attachment to outcome.

In extraordinary circumstances and against the odds, Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Halifax, and that one decision changed the course of history.

The Halifaxes weren’t a superstitious couple — they were the kind of couple that caused superstition.

I have come to see that mental states are also ecosystems. These sometimes friendly and at times hazardous terrains are natural environments embedded in the greater system of our character.

The one firm rock on which everyone was willing to build for the last two years was the French army,” wrote Foreign Secretary Halifax in his diary, “and the Germans walked through it like they did through the Poles.

Speaking in Creation's tongues, hearing Creation's voices, the boundary of our soul expands. Earth has many voices. Those who understand that Earth is a living being, know this because they have translated themselves to the humble grasses and old trees. They know that Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself; a communicating universe. And whether we know it or not, we are participating in the web of this community.

In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.

I knew the kind of look she'd given me. She was like people back home in Halifax, where people's friendliness was a measure of how big a fool they thought you were. They liked the look of themselves doing favours and thought you might fall for thinking that was kindness.

this had originally been the HQ of the famous Halifax Building Society, before mutuality had largely been abandoned in the greedy years since Thatcher. Carter smiled at his boss’s political reference but it meant little to him; he couldn’t remember the time before Thatcher.

Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain’s chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed. She wrote, “I could have killed him with pleasure.

He planned to go west immediately, but it’s so easy to linger in Halifax, where he falls prey to a personal weakness he’s been aware of all his life: Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.

Did I ever tell you about my last phone call?” Garrett asked. “Yes,” Clark said gently. “I believe you did.” Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was to his boss. The last words he’d spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate clichés, seared horribly into memory.

Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

Wenn die Menschen um ihre Freiheit kämpfen, erhalten sie durch ihren Sieg selten neue Herren.

Realizing fully the true nature of place is to talk its language and hold its silence.

Iris Murdoch defined humility as a “selfless respect for reality.

Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. But compassion actually mobilizes our immunity.

There is an accumulative cruelty in a number of men, though none in particular are ill-natured.

careful reconstruction of the British war-cabinet meetings between Friday, 24 May and Tuesday, 28 May, five days that could have changed the world. Lukac’s conclusion is inescapable: never was Hitler as close to total control over Western Europe as he was during that last week of May 1940. Britain almost presented him with a peace agreement which he would probably have accepted, and only one man was finally able to stand in the way: Churchill. Besides Churchill, the British war cabinet in those days had four other members, at least two of whom could be counted among the ‘appeasers’: Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. The other two, Clement Atlee and Arthur Greenwood (representing Labour), had no experience in government at that time. On

Guided death meditation is something I usually do with healthy people who want to understand how to help those who are terminally ill. But I think it might help Win a little; bring her some peace. The meditation was developed by Joan Halifax and Larry Rosenberg, based on the nine contemplations of dying—written by Atisha, a highly revered Tibetan monk, in the eleventh century.

In his last letter to Hitler, on December 1941, Gandhi praised the Führer’s ‘bravery [and] devotion to your Fatherland . . . Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.’82 Gandhi was fortunate that it was the Viceroy who ruled India rather than Hitler; the Führer’s advice to Lord Halifax when they met at Berchtesgaden in 1937 had been ‘Shoot Gandhi.

Now, I do not know who I am. I have never not known with more conviction in my life. I find myself writing in my journal each morning, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." How much of what I have lost or given up has been to the disease of my anxiety, how much to the nature of motherhood, how much to the simple fact of time? I can't begin to work through these questions until I first accept the loss of the mother I thought I was or could be. I believe, I hope, that on the other side of this loss is a love that I have found in connecting with other women. These women have, in the words of Joan Halifax, found "the gold of compassion in the dark stone of suffering." I have never loved women or needed them the way I have since becoming a mother.

There is evidence from evolutionary biology, sociology, neuroscience, and many other fields that we need to abandon our old misanthropic (and misogynist) notions for a sweeping new view of human nature.

Why climb a mountain? Look! a mountain there. I don’t climb mountain. Mountain climbs me. Mountain is myself. I climb on myself. There is no mountain nor myself. Something moves up and down in the air. Nanao Sakaki

if we manipulate others into not sharing so we don’t have to hear, so we don’t have to listen, or if we react with horror or abandon the scene, we stifle our empathy and rob ourselves of this fundamental virtue of humanity.

Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?” - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?” Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

This revitalization over drink and dinner was something of a pattern, as Lord Halifax’s wife, Dorothy, had noted in the past: Churchill would be “silent, grumpy and remote” at the start of a meal, she wrote. “But mellowed by champagne and good food he became a different man, and a delightful and amusing companion.” After Clementine once criticized his drinking, he told her, “Always remember, Clemmie, that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Monday 7 May [Halifax] Foolish fancying about Caroline Greenwood, meeting her on Skircoat Moor, taking her into a shed there is there & being connected with her. Supposing myself in men’s clothes & having a penis, tho’ nothing more. All this is very bad. Let me try to make a great exertion & get the better of this lazyness [sic] in a morning – the root of all evil… Now I will try & turn over a new leaf & waste no more time in bed or any way else that I can help. May God’s help attend this resolution.

Thursday 8 February [Halifax] Came upstairs at 11 a.m. Spent my time from then till 3, writing to M— very affectionately, more so than I remember to have done for long… Wrote the following crypt, ‘I can live upon hope, forget that we grow older, & love you as warmly as ever. Yes, Mary, you cannot doubt the love of one who has waited for you so long & patiently. You can give me all of happiness I care for &, prest to the heart which I believe my own, caressed & treasured there, I will indeed be constant & never, from that moment, feel a wish or thought for any other than my wife. You shall have every smile & every breath of tenderness. “One shall our union & our interests be” & every wish that love inspires & every kiss & every dear feeling of delight shall only make me more securely & entirely yours.’ Then, after hoping to see her in York next winter & at Steph’s2 before the end of the summer, I further wrote in crypt as follows, ‘I do not like to be too long estranged from you sometimes, for, Mary, there is a nameless tie in that soft intercourse which blends us into one & makes me feel that you are mine. There is no feeling like it. There is no pledge which gives such sweet possession.’ Monday 12 February [Halifax] Letter… from Anne Belcombe (Petergate, York)… nothing but news & concluded, ‘from your ever sincere, affectionate, Anne Belcombe.’ The seal, Cupid in a boat guided by a star. ‘Si je te perds, je suis perdu.’3 Such letters as these will keep up much love on my part. I shall not think much about her but get out of the scrape as well as I can, sorry & remorseful to have been in it at all. Heaven forgive me, & may M— never know it.

In May 1940 Gandhi told a friend, ‘I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.’81 In his last letter to Hitler, on December 1941, Gandhi praised the Führer’s ‘bravery [and] devotion to your Fatherland … Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.’82 Gandhi was fortunate that it was the Viceroy who ruled India rather than Hitler; the Führer’s advice to Lord Halifax when they met at Berchtesgaden in 1937 had been ‘Shoot Gandhi.

In May 1940 Gandhi told a friend, ‘I do not consider Hitler to be as bad as he is depicted. He is showing an ability that is amazing and seems to be gaining his victories without much bloodshed.’81 In his last letter to Hitler, on December 1941, Gandhi praised the Führer’s ‘bravery [and] devotion to your Fatherland . . . Nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.’82 Gandhi was fortunate that it was the Viceroy who ruled India rather than Hitler; the Führer’s advice to Lord Halifax when they met at Berchtesgaden in 1937 had been ‘Shoot Gandhi.

His manner of dealing with explosives also caused her consternation. On one occasion Helen joined Parsons and Forman on one of their recreational skyrocket launching trips in the desert. Sitting in the back seat of the car, she lifted up a rug covering the floor to find it had been hiding sticks and sticks of dynamite, no doubt taken from Halifax by Parsons. Nervously leaning forward to the front seat where Parsons and Forman were sitting, she asked whether the explosives were safe. As the truck bumped heavily along the desert road, Parsons turned to her with an amused grin and told her not to worry: “The detonator’s in the front seat.

25 May, as the extent of the French defeat became apparent, Lord Halifax carefully began sounding out the Italian ambassador to find out what concessions would be needed to ‘bribe’ Italy from entering the war. Gibraltar, perhaps, or Malta? He hoped that Italy could provide the initiative for a peace conference with Hitler, leading to a ‘general European arrangement’. England was to keep the sea and its empire, while Germany could do as it pleased on the continent. Hitler would probably have agreed to such a proposal: it was roughly the same division of roles Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers had contemplated in 1914. As a result, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark and Norway – the lion’s share of Europe – would have been transformed into a federation of Nazi

REGULARLY ATTEND AN ANNUAL security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The only thing unusual about the November 2016 meeting was that it occurred just after the U.S. presidential election, and most of the formal and informal conversations among the conferees were about what to expect from the President-elect, Donald Trump. The subject was causing consternation among the governments, military, and intelligentsia of the West, including ours. I spent most of my time in Halifax reassuring friends that the United States government consists of more than the White House. Congress and, I hoped, the people the new President would appoint to senior national security positions would provide continuity in U.S. foreign policy, compensate for the lack of experience in the Oval Office, and restrain the occupant from impulsively reacting to world events. Saturday evening, when the day’s presentations were finished, a retired British diplomat, who had served as the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Russia during

Shantideva wrote in chapter eight, verse ninety-nine (VIII: 99) of A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life that if someone is suffering and we refuse to help, it would be like our hand refusing to remove a thorn from our foot. If the foot is pierced by a thorn, our hand naturally pulls the thorn out of the foot. The hand doesn’t ask the foot if it needs help. The hand doesn’t say to the foot, “This is not my pain.” Nor does the hand need to be thanked by the foot. They are part of one body, one heart.

fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. The words that Churchill used in these short, punchy sentences were all but two derived from Old English. ‘Confidence’ derives from Latin and ‘surrender’ comes from the French. In November 1942, the Conservative minister Walter Elliot told Major-General John Kennedy that after Churchill had sat down he whispered to him: ‘I don’t know what we’ll fight them with – we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles – empty ones of course.’50 Churchill’s public insistence on continuing the struggle represented a victory for him inside the five-man British War Cabinet, which for five days between 24 and 28 May discussed the possibility of opening peace negotiations with Hitler, initially via Mussolini.51 The proponent of this course, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, nonetheless always made it clear that he would not countenance any peace that involved sacrificing the Royal

exchanging practically all the British infantry and artillery in India for Territorial batteries and battalions, and the formation of the 27th, 28th and 29th Divisions of regular troops. The New Zealand contingent must be escorted to Australia and there, with 25,000 Australians, await convoys to Europe. Meanwhile the leading troops of the Canadian Army, about 25,000 strong, had to be brought across the Atlantic. All this was of course additional to the main situation in the North Sea and to the continued flow of drafts, reinforcements and supplies across the Channel. Meanwhile the enemy’s Fleet remained intact, waiting, as we might think, its moment to strike; and his cruisers continued to prey upon the seas. To strengthen our cruiser forces we had already armed and commissioned twenty-four liners as auxiliary cruisers, and had armed defensively fifty-four merchantmen. Another forty suitable vessels were in preparation. In order to lighten the strain in the Indian Ocean and to liberate our light cruisers for their proper work of hunting down the enemy, I proposed the employment of our old battleships (Canopus class) as escorts to convoys. Besides employing these old battleships on convoy, we had also at the end of August sent three others abroad as rallying points for our cruisers in case a German heavy cruiser should break out: thus the Glory was sent to Halifax, the Albion to

I have seen many a face that was more good-looking — never one that looked half so good.

It is one of my decided opinions that married people ought to have no one, be the tie ever so close and dear, living permanently with them, to break the sacred duality — no, let me say the unity of their home.

The sheriff listened uneasily to a sound, very uncommon at elections, of the populace expressing an opinion contrary to that of the lord of the soil.

assumed everyone

I could hear the voice that, speaking to me, was always tender with pity—yet not pity enough to wound: I could see the peculiar smile just creeping round his grave mouth—that irrepressible smile, indicating the atmosphere of thorough heart-cheerfulness, which ripens all the fruits of a noble nature, and without which the very noblest has about it something unwholesome, blank, and cold.

Timeline 1795 Daniel McInnis, John Smith, Anthony Vaughan 1804-05 The Onslow Company 1849-50 The Truro Company 1861-65 The Oak Island Association 1866-67 The Eldorado Company of 1866 (a.k.a. The Halifax Company) 1878 Mrs. Sophia Sellers accidentally discovers the Cave-In Pit 1893-99 The Oak Island Treasure Co. (Frederick Blair) 1909-11 The Old Gold Salvage Company (Captain Henry Bowdoin) 1931 William Chappell 1934 Thomas Nixon 1935-38 Gilbert Hedden 1938-44 Professor Edwin Hamilton 1951 Mel Chappell and Associates 1955 George Green 1958 William and Victor Harman 1959-65 Robert Restall 1965-66 Robert Dunfield 1969-2006 Triton Alliance (David Tobias and Dan Blankenship) 2006 Oak Island Tours Inc. (Marty Lagina, Rick Lagina, Craig Tester, Alan J. Kostrzewa, and Dan Blankenship)

Later, while Andrew Demont was in hospital in Halifax, Ed White visited him and told him that the water had been up to Demont’s lips by the time White was able to secure him in the rope-harness. Demont told me that at the top of the shaft he could smell nothing, but that as he started down the ladder, a foul-smelling odor had overwhelmed him. As he looked into the shaft he could see Karl Graeser sitting underwater, with only the very top of his head showing. Andrew said he saw Bobby, his eyes closed, supporting his dad’s head just above the waterline. Andrew said he placed his hand on Bobby’s shoulder, and then he, too, drifted into unconsciousness. Apparently he stayed like that as the water slowly rose around him, until Ed White came to rescue him. Many years later I was told that the gas that overwhelmed the men was probably hydrogen sulphide, a lethal gas that can form when rotting vegetation is combined with salt water. Apparently, it can be odourless or have a foul rotten-egg smell, depending on the concentration. There is no doubt in my mind that there was salt water in the ground near the new shaft. Right beside it were two tall apple trees. The apples that grew on those trees looked like a type we call “Transparents” in Ontario. Those two trees looked exactly like others on the island, but they bore delicious, crisp, tangy fruit, whereas apples from similar trees were tasteless. A local woman told me that when apple trees grow near the sea in a mix of fresh water and salt water, they produce juicy, sharp, flavourful apples. Could the salt water that nurtured those apples have reacted with the coconut fibre, eel grass, and other old vegetation that had lain dormant for so long in the pirates’ beachwork, producing the deadly hydrogen sulphide? Could the “porridge-like” earth that was encountered only at this location on the island be in some way related to this toxic combination? We may never know.

She’d expected a middle-aged woman, but Marian MacAdam must have been well into her seventies. She wore a beautifully tailored camel overcoat that helped camouflage her stooped back. A pink-and-orange scarf was tied artfully around her neckline. Kate bet she drove either an Audi or a Mercedes. That was the car of choice for well-heeled Halifax matrons. The

Birdfoot’s Grampa The old man must have stopped our car two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands the small toads blinded by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain. ******** The rain was falling a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you can’t save them all accept it, get back in we’ve got places to go. But the leathery hands full of wet brown life knee deep in the summer roadside grass he just smiled and said they have places to go too.

The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay, constantly represented the statesmen of the Revolution as the legitimate ancestors of modern liberty. It is humiliating to trace a political lineage to Algernon Sidney, who was the paid agent of the French king; to Lord Russell, who opposed religious toleration at least as much as absolute monarchy; to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood shed by the perjury of Titus Oates; to Halifax, who insisted that the plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough, who sent his comrades to perish on an expedition which he had betrayed to the French; to Locke, whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time of Charles II. to that of George I. he never knew a politician who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts threw back the cause of progress for a century.

It is clear from this that if Halifax and not Churchill had become prime minister, he would have wanted to seek accommodation with Germany, or at any rate considered peace terms if Hitler offered them. He would have had some support outside the cabinet. Some ministers would have followed him.

On October 31 the immunity of the Halifax convoys from attack was at last broken, and the American destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed and sunk with severe loss of life. This was the first loss suffered by the United States Navy in the still undeclared war.

Aunque Chamberlain seguía negándose a escuchar el consejo de Churchill de vincular a Rusia al tratado anglofrancés, Halifax hizo pública una nota de prensa afirmando que, en el caso de un ataque alemán a Checoslovaquia, «Francia se verá obligada a acudir en su ayuda, y no cabe duda de que Gran Bretaña y Rusia estarán al lado de Francia». Lejos de ir en contra de un supuesto pacifismo popular, esto reflejaba exactamente el talante predominante entre la opinión pública británica, que en ningún momento se había mostrado tan abúlica como Chamberlain y su entorno.

For Lord Halifax, Britain was a geographical entity, a place of hills, dales, moors and tors, an H. E. Bates world durable enough to resist whatever brutal regime was in effective charge. For Churchill, Britain was more than this. It was the original model of liberty, a land whose existence depended on freedom and the rule of law. If these were extinguished, her survival meant nothing. And while both views were rosy and sentimental in their different ways, the latter was closer to the truth – and a great deal more humane.

True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. Edward Frederick Halifax

Even more thaqn making money, Joe Kennedy's special gift is elf promotion. Chamberlain can't go to the bathroom without Kennedy.

Modesty is oftner mistaken than any other Virtue.

Men who borrow their opinions can never repay their debts.

He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.

A wise man will keep his Suspicions muzzled, but he will keep them awake.

Men take more pains to hide than to mend themselves.

If Men considered how many Things there are that Riches cannot buy, they would not be so fond of them.

Anger is never without an Argument, but seldom with a good one.

The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject.

Acknowledgements I must acknowledge my debt to so many people and sources. I learnt about the activities of those extraordinarily brave women of the SOE from Marcus Binney’s book: The Women Who Lived for Danger and about what it was like to be a spy from The Spy Wore Red by Aline Countess of Romanones. To find out more about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I read A War of Nerves by Ben Shephard. Phil Kemp from the Yorkshire Air Museum kindly allowed me to clamber around inside the only reconstructed Halifax Bomber in the World. He told me the lipstick story. An ex-soldier who had served in Bosnia gave me more intimate details about suffering from PTSD.

As Tara walked down the corner past the vacant lot that once was the unofficial refuge for kids on the street in Halifax, she realized just how far they had both travelled from that dark end of the street, just how far they had travelled from the front steps of Hell’s Hotel.

Here were the results of a city underprepared for wartime growth, a city caught napping, while it quickly became one of the most crucial ports in North America as the Allies fought the Germans.

Thomas Berry, in The Dream of the Earth,

Hitler for five hours: sulking, shouting, digressing, denouncing. He talked about how much he hated the press. He talked about the evils of communism. Halifax listened to the performance with what another British diplomat at the time called a “mixture of astonishment, repugnance, and compassion.

he may have crossed the borderline into insanity.” Henderson wasn’t in Hitler’s thrall. But did he think Hitler had dishonorable intentions toward Czechoslovakia? No. Hitler, he believed, “hates war as much as anyone.” Henderson, too, read Hitler all wrong.2 The blindness of Chamberlain and Halifax and Henderson is not at all like Puzzle Number One, from the previous chapter. That was about the inability of otherwise intelligent and dedicated people to understand when they are being deceived. This is a situation where some people were deceived by Hitler and others were not. And the puzzle is that the group who were deceived are the ones you’d expect not to be, while those who saw the truth are the ones you’d think would be deceived. Winston Churchill, for example, never believed for a moment that Hitler was anything more than a duplicitous thug. Churchill called Chamberlain’s visit “the stupidest thing that has ever been done.” But Hitler was someone he’d only ever read about. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain’s cabinet ministers, was equally clear-eyed. He listened with horror to Chamberlain’s account of his meeting with Hitler. Later, he would resign from Chamberlain’s government in protest. Did Cooper know Hitler? No. Only one person in the upper reaches of the British diplomatic service—Anthony Eden, who preceded Halifax as foreign secretary—had both met Hitler and saw the truth of him. But for everyone else? The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew