Andrew D. Lambert > Quotes

“In case anyone in America had missed the utter helplessness of their government, 4,000 British troops captured and burned Washington DC. The Presidential mansion, where the decision for war had been taken, was one of the public buildings to be torched.”
― Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812

“Bermuda, the sunny southern twin of Halifax.”
― Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812

“Corbett condemned a failure of imagination that devalued the process: the persistent heresy of regarding military and naval strategy as two different subjects that can be dealt with apart, of refusing to see them broadly as mere branches of the great art of war, two branches so intimately intertwined that one can never be treated apart from the other, and least of all when we are dealing with the fundamental problems of Insular or Imperial Defence. Lord Elgin’s Commission had treated the Navy as ‘a negligible quantity’, because it had no authority to consider wider strategic issues.76”
― Andrew D. Lambert, The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy

“Napoleon bullied and deceived Jefferson and his successor James Madison because America was impotent. Without fleets and armies, their arguments about international law and morality lacked weight.”
― Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812

“Alongside the elevated sentiments and intellectual insight, Jefferson was, at heart, authoritarian and anti-democratic. The Republican Party was the state; those who held different views were traitors.”
― Andrew Lambert, The Challenge: Britain Against America in the Naval War of 1812