Perhaps the careful study of man’s past will explain to me much that seems inexplicable in his disconcerting present.  Perhaps the means of salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised, carefully concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting rediscovery to be acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women. (Vera Brittain – British writer, feminist and pacifist – in Testament of Youth, 1933)