Hugh Thomas

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“The experience of the Mayas is one more reminder that any interpretation of human evolution based on the idea of unilineal progress forwards (or upwards) is an illusion. Peoples decline as well as rise.”

“The philosophy of the discoveries, the emigration, and the colonisation was Christianity. Ferdinand and Isabel, King and Queen of a new, if precariously united, Spain, had conquered Granada in 1492. They had been hailed by the Pope not only as the “Catholic kings” but as “athletes of Christ’’. The primate of Spain, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros, likened himself, not wholly inappropriately, given his fighting spirit, to a new Joshua.”

“Unamuno died broken-hearted on the last day of 1936. The tragedy of his last months was a natural expression of a society in which, by a law of September, all books of ‘Socialist or Communist tendencies had been ordered to be destroyed as a matter of public health’. In December all such books (or any ‘generally disruptive’ matter) were ordered to be handed in within forty-eight hours.”