Historical Metaphors, Analogies and Similes
Everyone agreed it was the best party ever, but the worshippers of the golden calf thought the same.
Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
The basement flat felt claustrophobic like Jonah in a baby whale.
Dithering advice last seen by King Ethelred 'The Unready' in 1016 AD.
His bearing resembled Genghis Khan contemplating the fate of captives.
Be a Columbus to new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
The lady with the bangles, corrugated-iron perm and asymmetrically-lifted face used to be Mary Queen of Scots. The man with the mascara and the comb-over was Tutankhamun.
Hamilton basked in the attention like the Sun King at Versailles.
Dido sang more dodgy notes than the Marquis de Sade.
I have Lord Nelson’s hand-eye coordination.
Be careful, exactly the same feeling led Napoleon to invade Russia.
Stupidity leaked over their epoch like gas-fumes from a defective stove.
We owe a lot to Thomas Edison — if it wasn't for him we'd be watching television by candlelight.
The garden had been turned over to look like a film set for the Battle of Somme.
I admire your convictions but fear for you, like a young man starting a career as an outspoken theologian under Nazi rule.
Claude approached me like Hitler previewing Czechoslovakia.
The Nazis invaded Poland like food colouring entering a jar of clear water.
Our low standard of snooker made it a long game: an epic of attrition like the Battle of Stalingrad.
As ruthless as a Gestapo thug.
I have never accepted what many people have kindly said — namely, that I inspired the nation. It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion's heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.
Charles de Gaulle looks like a female llama surprised in her bath.
Her silhouette was like a wooden doll the shape of Khrushchev's wife.
His wounded soul smouldered like a burnt village in the path of the Tet offensive.
To forget one's ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
When we speak of an individual we have to likewise speak of the age in which he lived. You disguise a portrait if you cut it out of it's frame.
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
History burrows below the surface like a tree root that splits concrete.
Slide projector memories of a Technicolor past in over-saturated Walt Disney colours.
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