The company had a remarkable safety record: not a single passenger death from sinking, collision, ice, weather, fire, or any other circumstance where blame could be laid upon captain or company,
The Death of Boris,’ by Mussorgsky?
That you have found me … among so many millions is the miracle of our time! he cried. And that I have found you, that is Germany’s fortune!
THE DATE WAS APRIL 14, 1912, a sinister day in maritime history, but of course the man in suite 63–65, shelter deck C, did not yet know it. What he did know was that his foot hurt badly, more than he...
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.Daniel H. Burnham
In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral u...
I wear a pony coat with skin like watered silk and muff of lamb. My fingers lie in depths of warmth. I have a jacket of silver sequins and heavy bracelets of rich corals. I wear about my neck a triple...
I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future, he wrote. In laying out Central Park we determined to think of no resul...
Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular.
Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves h...
Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated...
His quest to create a powerful first impression was good showmanship, but it also exposed the aesthetic despot residing within.
His letter to Rice began, I have on hand a great project for the World’s Fair in Chicago. I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250’ in dia. Nowhere in this letter, however, did he reveal t...
Her blind endorsement of Hitler’s regime first faded to a kind of sympathetic skepticism, but as summer approached,
He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke that nearly removed her head from her spine.
He saw Hitler’s stature within Germany grow to that of a god. Women cried as he passed near; souvenir hunters dug up parcels of earth from the ground on which he stepped. At the September 1936 party r...
He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, You'll see it lovely. I never w...
He had only to assert the most commonplace thing and it sounded important and convincing.
He came from plebeian roots and had failed to distinguish himself in any way, not in war, not in work, not in art, though in this last domain he believed himself to have great talent. He was said to b...
He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.