Quotes from Tom Reiss

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

I once started a small business when I got out of college and enjoyed the stress of making it work. High-stress situations clear my head, and I love the challenge of getting along with many different kinds of people. I'm scared of routine.

In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East.

All the doors were open, all the faces were frightened; one felt that Death was there.

The word "buccaneer" originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.

Aristotle believed democracy could exist only because of slavery, which gave citizens the leisure for higher pursuits. (Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)

Servitude, like a destructive volcano, desiccates, burns, engulfs everything it surrounds: liberty, on the contrary, always brings in its wake happiness, abundance, and the arts.… Everything is free in a Kingdom where liberty is seated at the foot of the throne, where the least subject finds in the heart of his king the feelings of a father.… No one is [a] slave in France." The

Even as the armies of slaves were underfed and dying from hunger, some were forced to wear bizarre tin-plate masks, in hundred-degree heat, to keep them from gaining the slightest nourishment from chewing the cane. The

Where streetlights failed, there were lanternmen. The lanternmen—numbered, so the police could keep track of them—waited around the doors of townhouses in Paris whenever an entertainment was going on inside, and, for a few coins, one of them would accompany a reveler home, lighting his way even up the stairs and into his room.

Allah Is Great concludes with advice and warning: since Europe clearly does not want to ensure its hegemony through undisguised force, there is no alternative but to form a "community of interests with the Islamic world

this fails—then woe to Europe!

Thus, the armies that would slaughter each other in the 1940s in the most massive mechanized battles in history trained together in the 1920s.

January 18, 1797 GENERAL, I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle of the 27th [the 27 Nivôse, i.e., January 16] stated that I stayed in observation throughout that battle. I don't wish any such observation on him, since he would have shit in his pants. Salute and Brotherhood! ALEX. DUMAS

secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German "work commandos" would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react.

France's brilliant general Maurice de Saxe displayed audacious courage at twelve and commanded a regiment by seventeen

1780, as Thomas-Alexandre turned eighteen, the king issued a new law prohibiting people of color from using the titles Sieur or Dame ("Sir" or "Madame"). Saint-Georges remained a chevalier—and Thomas-Alexandre was a count—but neither could use "Sir" before his name without risking arrest.

But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals

The local Cairo clergy offered to issue a fatwa recognizing Napoleon as the legitimate ruler of Egypt—provided the entire French army formally convert to Islam. Napoleon actually considered the offer, but when it became clear that the muftis' demand included mass adult circumcision and total abstinence from wine, the conversion plan was scrapped.

the Black Legion

Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The

This gray little town fifty miles north of Paris acquired an outsized reputation for royal scandal, misbehavior, and debauchery, which in eighteenth-century France was saying something.

He also gives a good picture of the profound chaos unleashed in Muslim countries in 1924 by Ataturk's sudden abolition of the caliphate, an institution they had superficially not taken much notice of but which was central to a Muslim's whole identity.

Citizen Alexandre Dumas, he was thenceforth known only by the name—strongly compromising at that time, especially among the people who had given it to him—of Mr. Humanity.

Knights Templar.