Quotes from Erik Larson

Kennedy, in turn, was not well liked in London. The wife of Churchill's foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, detested the ambassador for his pessimism about Britain's chances for survival and his prediction that the RAF would quickly be crushed. She wrote, "I could have killed him with pleasure.

failure no matter how imposing the finished structure proved to be. Only Adler had previously demonstrated a clear grasp of the principles of acoustical design. "Burnham was not pleased," wrote Louis Sullivan, by now Adler's

Germany issued a proclamation designating the waters around the British Isles an "area of war" in which all enemy ships would be subject to attack without warning.

it is one thing to say Carry on, quite another to do it.

Sentences wandered through the report like morning glory through the pickets of a fence.

He recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest wines, foods, and cigars.

aerodrome" but, rather, "airfield"; not "aeroplane" but "aircraft." Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. "It is slothful not to compress your thoughts," he said. Such precise and demanding communication installed at all levels a new sense of responsibility for events, and dispelled the fustiness of routine ministerial work.

We believe in the Führer's powers of divination. We know that anything which now seems to be going against us will turn out to be most fortunate for us in the end." Goebbels knew, of course

Having seen it," Rudyard Kipling wrote, "I desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.

CHEQUERS AND ITS FULL-MOON SURROGATE, Ditchley, were by now a regular weekend ritual for Churchill. These brief sojourns took him away from the increasingly dreary, bomb-worn vistas of London, and salved that need within his English soul for trees, hollows, ponds, and birdsong.

His letter to Rice began, "I have on hand a great project for the World's Fair in Chicago. I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250' in dia." Nowhere in this letter, however, did he reveal the true dimension of his vision:

If some of what follows challenges what you have come to believe about Churchill and this era, may I just say that history is a lively abode, full of surprises.

If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking

Unmistakable and invulnerable, a floating village in steel, the Lusitania glided by in the night as a giant black shadow cast upon the sea.

remain today, among them the Rookery, its top-floor library much as it was during that magical meeting in February 1891, and the Reliance Building, beautifully transformed into the Hotel Burnham. Its restaurant is called the Atwood, after Charles Atwood, who replaced Root as Burnham's chief designer.

The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire.

Her gayety seemed like jewels on a skull

Tears come without any provocation.10 Headache all day." The school's headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. "Cheer up," she told Theodate.11 "Always be happy." It did not work.

But within a week, the brush fire gusted into a firestorm, spiking fears, resurrecting animosities, triggering alliances and understandings, and setting long-laid plans in motion.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

women "would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.

She acknowledged a heightened sensitivity to the world around her. "I think I have felt fear & anxiety & sorrow in small doses for the first time in my life. I do so love being young & I don't very much want to be 18. Although I often behave in a completely idiotic & 'haywire' fashion—yet I feel I have grown up quite a lot in the last year. I am glad of it.

Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America's awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune.