Bible and sword - Barbara Tuchman

Two major influences have drawn the British people to the Holy Land over the centuries - the translation of the Bible into English and the imperial need to control the routes to India and, more recently, to the oil of the Middle East. These two magnets - the Bible and the sword - have drawn countless pilgrims, crusaders, missionaries, merchants and explorers to the land of the ancient Hebrews.Barbara Tuchman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Zimmermann Telegram and The Guns of August, shows how these twin motivating forces of the Bible and the sword compelled the ancient crusaders and instilled themselves into the consciousness of the British people up to the present day. She writes stirringly and lucidly of Britain's conquest of the Turks at the end of World War I and the solemn moment of entering Jerusalem, an event that evoked the Balfour Declaration of 1917 establishing a British sponsored national home for the modern descendants of the Old Testament peoples.