" the next day, Salisbury set out his views on Russia in typically robust language. He dismissed the talk of a Russian advance on Kandahar, which, even if it did take place, ‘will only incur a hot version of the retreat from Moscow’. As so often, Salisbury suspected that his man in St Petersburg had gone native, proposing an Anglo-Russian settlement across the board. ‘You can have an entente with a man or government but no one except Canute’s ever tried to have it with a tide‚’ he wrote, arguing that the same military–religious impulses ‘which moved the hosts of Mahomet and those which moved the hosts of Attila’ were now operating on Russia, "

― Andrew Roberts , Salisbury: Victorian Titan