So many men … think absolute isolation a coming paradise.
She loved their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.
Samuel Gompers, standing at the back of speaker’s wagon No. 5, ask, Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and...
On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photog...
It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actu...
In this time when writing long letters was everyday practice, men of normal sensibility saw these cards as the most crabbed of media, little better than telegrams,
If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently
I was inclined to think him Jewish, she wrote; she considered his animus to be prompted only by his racial self-consciousness.
I FIRST STARTED READING about the Lusitania on a whim, following my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously.
Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular.
Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932.
He was a creature of the last turning of the centuries when sleep seemed to come more easily. Things were clear to him. He was loyal, a believer in dignity, honor, and effort.
He died angry, Chalmers said, because I didn’t believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.
Gleichschaltung.
Edith wrote later, This was the accidental meeting which carried out the old adage of ‘turn a corner and meet your fate.
During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, Tears come without any provocatio...
During heavy rains, river water flowed in a greasy plume far out into Lake Michigan, to the towers that marked the intake pipes for the city’s drinking water.
Churchill acknowledged Fisher’s energy and prior genius. But he was seventy-four years old, Churchill wrote, in an oblique evisceration. As in a great castle which has long contended with time, the mi...
Camille’s rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.
A. Scott Berg’s more recent Wilson; John Keegan’s wrenching The First World War; Martin Gilbert’s The First World War; Gerhard Ritter’s The Schlieffen Plan; Lowell Thomas’s 1928 book about World War I...