Quickly Franklin folded the owlish John Adams into his debilitating rounds, sweeping him off to meet the la Rochefoucauld family in their baronial home. He did so before Adams yet felt appropriately o...
History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.
For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in d...
Published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced
He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.
Beaumarchais sighed, consumed by his own labors, politics only rewards success. Best efforts earn only a bitter smile.
For all its erudition, Cleopatra’s Egypt produced no fine historian.
At a time of shuddering devastation, they stepped in as the dragon-slayers.
He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited.
But the standouts in the generations immediately preceding Cleopatra’s were—for vision, ambition, intellect—universally female.
But from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.
I went out to the desert where Cleopatra camped out with her mercenary army. It's a desolate outpost. Nothing has changed since her day. You realize how far she had to travel. Not only is it a good 15...
What is optimism? Alas, it is the mania for pretending that all is right,when in fact everything is wrong. —Voltaire, Candide
So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her.
Judging by the edicts passed to regulate commerce alone, Franklin stood ready to conclude that an assembly of wise men is the greatest fool upon earth.
In this world, he reminded a French friend, it is not faith that saves us, but defiance.
Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world histo...
You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.
When you predicted an apocalypse, you needed sooner or later to produce one.
Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image