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“... Fernand Braudel has pulled it off twice. For most French historians, the massive thesis required until recently for the doctorat d’état is their one piece of sustained research, after which they graduate, or subside, into writing learned articles, or textbooks for schools and universities. Even Gibbon felt a profound sense of relief when he wrote the last lines of the last page of the Decline and Fall, and he did not take up any other grand project ...”

“... eventually to the Industrial Revolution. The format will remind many readers of the structure of Braudel’s other book, the celebrated Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.1 In both works, the chronological account of what happened is left until last, coming almost as an anti-climax after a prolonged analysis of the ...”

“... my own provincialism. Of the seven historians studied in the book, I was familiar with only three: Fernand Braudel has been my mentor for more than quarter of a century; Lawrence Stone guided my first steps into the maze of Anglo-American historiography; Christopher Hill accompanied, a long time ago now, the infant squawks of my early Marxism, which today ...”

“... Fernand​ Braudel’s wife, Paule, remembered sitting with him on a wintry day at a café in Dubrovnik in the 1930s, watching a boat laden with firewood slowly coming into the port. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we are in the 16th century.’ It was this sense of historical time that gave Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), its strikingly original structure ...”

“... the same period of time. Some of the credit must go to a succession of scholars, Philippe Ariès, Fernand Braudel, Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie among them, who combined intellectual power with formidable originality and entrepreneurial verve. But it is the kind of history writers like these have publicised that has been the main cause of ...”

“... knowledge’, it is not at all clear to me that he is making a political statement Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and the Annales school of history in general have reguraly deplored individual operations in history, and called for collective historical enterprises on a grand scale. Such enterprises are likely to involve the state in financing something ...”

“... Shortly before his death, I talked to Braudel about the motives that lay behind his final book, The Identity of France. He had made his reputation as a universal historian, with a global curiosity. Why should he seek to crown his achievement in such a parochial fashion, proclaiming that it was France, after all, that he really loved? ‘I am a Frenchman, just like any other,’ he said ...”

“... soil, food, prices, population – which shaped the lives of the majority. In the writings of Fernand Braudel the Mediterranean took precedence because it imposed the most fundamental limitations on Philip II’s foreign policy. In other works by the school the individual disappeared altogether, along with time, in the frozen immobility of the ...”

“... of epochs and periods, looking at an enormous variety of aspects of societies in the past. Some, Fernand Braudel among them, took vast geographical areas as their subject, and showed how key structures of human existence transcended the conventional boundaries of the state; others took one province or town and linked together in a complex but convincing ...”

“... constraints, and how does he deal with them? Elliott’s book is in an important sense an ‘anti-Braudel’. The late Fernand Braudel made his reputation as the most original historian of our century with his study of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, in which he undertook to show that the king was to a ...”

“... shape the course of European history on the road to 1914, or were the monarchs (to paraphrase Fernand Braudel) mere crests of foam that the tides of international history carry on their strong backs? The book is less successful in its attempt to integrate the story of the clan with the grand narrative of European politics. The sheer scale and ...”

“... The most renowned historian of his time. Fernand Braudel owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986 ...”

“... who did it ‘mit Papier’. But in Antwerp, everyone traded with paper. When he came to study it, Fernand Braudel found the trade in bills of exchange and money-changing ‘not only complicated, but diabolical’.The nouveaux riches of Antwerp loved nothing more than eating huge quantities of meat. The 62 old butchering families couldn’t keep pace. In ...”

“... we are the sons of no one and everyone.’ Symptomatic of this mood was the fact that in the 1980s Fernand Braudel should have turned to writing a somewhat elegiac book on ‘the identity of France’; or that at the same time the Socialist Minister of Education Jean-Pierre Chevènement tried to reintroduce lessons in civic values in schools and make ...”

“... as the lower orders by means of television serials about early Roman emperors. As the great Fernand Braudel observes, ‘the obscure history of everyman’ (l’histoire obscure de tout le monde) is ‘the history toward which, in different ways, all historiography tends at present’. Histories claiming to take ‘peoples’ (as distinct from top ...”