Squeezed the present for all it was worth. He believed meaning is found only in the present, for the past is gone and the future looms indeterminate if it arrives at all.
Oceanography, meteorology, and upper-atmosphere physics,
Is equally true that throughout his life he retained the small boy’s glee in making mischief, in dressing up, in showing off. He was probably the only man in London who owned more hats than his wife—t...
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Then, after calling
Later he would say that writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is th...
It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles the only bull who brings his own china shop with him, and who coined the progression, dull, duller, Dulles.
And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously re-worded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The Prime Minister scrawled across the page, This is nonsense up with which I wi...
The Jap, as MacArthur called the enemy—nearly everyone else called Japanese Nips, short for Dai Nippon, the
It is a source of endless wonder that these two islands lying side by side off the coast of Europe should have been the fount of so much anguish, each for the other. One spawned the mightiest empire i...
In the nineteenth century, he observed, Jules Verne wrote Round the World in Eighty Days. It seemed a prodigy. Now you can get around it in four, but you do not see much of it on the way.
If Peking wasn’t stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as the military colossus of the East. U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world’s new nations would gravitate towa...
I like to live in the past. I don't think people are going to get much fun in the future
Have another drink, and then I learn, for the hundredth time, that you can't drown your troubles, not the real ones, because if they are real they can swim.