I can safely say that there were only two books that I read at Oxford which strongly influenced my subsequent approach... The first was Clausewitz's On War... The other was Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization – if I read it again now I do not know what I would think of it, but certainly that was a starting point for my interest in looking at history in technological terms rather than in the constitutional/political terms prevalent at Oxford.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I can safely say that there were only two books that I read at Oxford which strongly influenced my subsequent approach... The first was Clausewitz's On War... The other was Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization – if I read it again now I do not know what I would think of it, but certainly that was a starting point for my interest in looking at history in technological terms rather than in the constitutional/political terms prevalent at Oxford." in the context of "Correlli Barnett, interview with Richard English and Michael Kenny in Cambridge (16 July 1996), quoted in Richard English and Michael Kenny (eds.), Rethinking British Decline (1999), p. 47" to mean that wisdom is timeless.