Apparently, a week Japan was laughable; but a strong Japan was immediately transformed into the prime example of a "Yellow Peril". Might Japan forever be stuck in a kind of no man's land between East and West, not allowed to assimilate into the international order of the Western nations as an equal, forever grouped with the countries of the East among which she felt herself superior, and respected fully by neither group?

— Charles Emmerson

Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.

— Charles Emmerson

His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubbiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers preferred to encourage him in his idleness.

— Charles Emmerson

It (urban peacekeeping) was quite a task, requiring a permanent balancing act between communities, each with their own interests, festivals, traditions and historical rivalries imported from the wide-open spaces of the countryside into close quarters.

— Charles Emmerson

Nationalist (forces around the world) could now more readily communicate and share their grievances, viewing themselves as similar groups, engaged in a common struggle for greater autonomy against control exerted from London or Paris.

— Charles Emmerson

Newspapers provided a common culture of aspiration.

— Charles Emmerson

New York presented a paradox. While foreigners thought of New York has the symbol of America, many Americans viewed the city with some suspicion as the country's most foreign.

— Charles Emmerson

The city (of Vienna) had an unerring tradition of celebrating some of it's greatest composers after it had around them to die in poverty.

— Charles Emmerson

The long-term integrity of the empire would not be assured by warm words alone. Britain's own position in the empire had changed. Once, the country been the engine room of empire, the productive heart of the beast. But with Britain becoming more like a boardroom, investing money, taking decisions, but essentially living off the labor of others, and off the earnings of the past? At some point in the future, might even this role wither away, and might Britain become little more than a repository of British tradition, a common idealized land into which Britons abroad – in Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa – could retreat, a collective memory of Greenfield's and swooping glens?

— Charles Emmerson

The overall result was drift punctuated by protest.

— Charles Emmerson