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...
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...
History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.
He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.
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.
At a time of shuddering devastation, they stepped in as the dragon-slayers.
Beaumarchais sighed, consumed by his own labors, politics only rewards success. Best efforts earn only a bitter smile.
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...
In this world, he reminded a French friend, it is not faith that saves us, but defiance.
For all its erudition, Cleopatra’s Egypt produced no fine historian.
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...
Published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced
You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.
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.
If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. —Horace Walpole
He is drunk at least 22 hours of every 24 and never without one or two whores in company.)
For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god. —HES...
What is optimism? Alas, it is the mania for pretending that all is right,when in fact everything is wrong. —Voltaire, Candide