Quotes from Jonathan Rose

Historians, as Robert Darnton observed in 1980, 'want to penetrate the mental world of ordinary persons as well as philosophers, but they keep running into the vast silence that has swallowed up most of mankind's thinking.

Like his fellow inmates, Churchill was driven by an "earnest desire to do something, however small, for the British cause," with one important difference: "Of course, I am a man of peace. I do not fight. But swords are not the only weapons in the world. Something may be done with a pen.

Or, to take the analogy imagined by Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger in Jews and Words, the reader today who consumes "Tolstoy and Toni Morrison with his morning coffee while skimming two news sites on his electronic device and perusing the small print on his breakfast cereal package.