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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 42e9dba | In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: "The infliction of physical punishment is not every man's job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the bus.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 803c3f6 | The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph. It allowed him to fulfill his pledge to his parents to become the greatest architect in America, for certainly in his day he had become so. During the fair an event occurred whose significance to Burnham was missed by al.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 3ab85b1 | There were so many items on the menu that Cunard felt obliged to print a separate sheet with suggested combinations, lest one starve from befuddlement. | Erik Larson | ||
| c83b5c9 | OF THE LUSITANIA'S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 survived. Over 600 passengers were never found. Among the dead were 123 Americans. | Erik Larson | ||
| e2664bb | THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city's willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world's fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. .. | Erik Larson | ||
| 14369eb | Five months after the disaster, Charles Lauriat wrote a book about his experience, entitled The Lusitania's Last Voyage | Erik Larson | ||
| 3332ba5 | She eventually adopted the "gold collar" and married a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Wallace Riddle. She achieved her goal of creating a progressive boys' school as a memorial to her late father. She built it in Avon, Connecticut, and called it Avon Old Farms School, which exists today." | Erik Larson | ||
| 7677182 | A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection. The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a "dead wake." | Erik Larson | ||
| e2fb547 | Gleichschaltung. | Erik Larson | ||
| ea5d2cb | found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler's Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of Sigrid Schultz, Hans V. Kaltenborn, and Louis Lochner. A short and lovely walk away, in the library of the University of Wisconsin, I found as well a supply of materials on the only UW alumna to be guillotined at Hitler's command, Mildred Fish .. | Erik Larson | ||
| ae94761 | These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower. | Erik Larson | ||
| 7fa37bb | locked forever in the embrace of history. Wilson signed the resolution at 1:18 P.M. on April 6, 1917. To Winston Churchill, it was long overdue. In his memoir-like history The World Crisis, 1916-1918, he said of Wilson, "What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915." | Erik Larson | ||
| 7ca8df5 | Ferris had nearly gotten it right. In that single day 713,646 people had paid to enter Jackson Park. (Only 31,059--four percent--were children.) Another 37,380 visitors had entered using passes, bringing the total admission for the day to 751,026, more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history. The Tribune argued that the only greater gathering was the massing of Xerxes' army of over five million souls in the.. | Erik Larson | ||
| db883fe | THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation's psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney's father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt's Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family's third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby bec.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 5ac0560 | William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnha.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 612ca66 | She lapsed into "melancholia," a sweet name for depression." | Erik Larson | ||
| c084af0 | In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness. | Erik Larson | ||
| b3dba45 | Only holders of a cipher "key" could divine the underlying text, but possessing the codebooks made the whole process of solving the messages far simpler. To exploit these treasures the Admiralty established Room 40." | Erik Larson | ||
| 9c195fe | From the start, Churchill and Fisher resolved to keep the operation so secret that only they and a few other Admiralty officials would ever know it existed. | Erik Larson | ||
| 5d08f22 | paper, at least, it reported to Adm. Henry Francis Oliver, the Admiralty's chief of staff, a man so tight-lipped and reticent he could seem almost mute, and this--given the British navy's predilection for nicknames--ensured that he would be known forever after as "Dummy" Oliver." | Erik Larson | ||
| d274f52 | Between flattery and admiration there often flows a river of contempt. | Admiration | ||
| f8e68df | Within Room 40 itself, however, management of day-to-day operations fell largely, if informally, to Cdr. Herbert Hope, recruited in November 1914 to bring naval expertise to the interpretation of intercepted messages. His savvy was badly needed, for the group's staff were not navy officers but civilians recruited for their skill at mathematics and German and whatever else it was that made a man good at breaking codes and ciphers. The roster.. | Erik Larson | ||
| eb6628b | Captain Hall had no direct control over Room 40--as of early 1915 his intelligence division and Room 40 were separate entities--but his name more than any other would come to be associated with its achievements. | Erik Larson | ||
| 969a3d6 | Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people--men, women, and children--simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps. | Erik Larson | ||
| a75e78a | Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain's strategy had undergone a change. | Erik Larson | ||
| ecbdf2c | If the British navy acted in response to every foretold movement of the German fleet, it risked revealing to Germany that its codes had been broken. In a secret internal memorandum, Admiral Oliver wrote that "the risk of compromising the codes ought only to be taken when the result would be worth it." But what did "worth it" mean? Some of the men within Room 40 contended that much useful information was stockpiled and never used because the.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 58f7c4f | He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it. | Erik Larson | ||
| 7ae04a6 | Had we been called upon by the Staff to do so," Hope wrote, referring to Oliver, "we could have furnished valuable information as to movements of submarines, minefields, minesweeping etc. But the Staff was obsessed with the idea of secrecy; they realized that they held a trump card and they worked on the principle that every effort must be made to keep our knowledge to ourselves, so as to be able to keep it up our sleeves for a really great.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 3214602 | Room 40 had long followed Kptlt. Walther Schwieger's U-20 and kept a running record of his patrols: when he left, which route he took, where he was headed, and what he was supposed to do once he got there. In early March 1915, Commander Hope monitored a voyage Schwieger made to the Irish Sea that coincided with a disturbing message broadcast from a German naval transmitter located at Norddeich, on Germany's North Sea coast just below Hollan.. | Erik Larson | ||
| dc682ad | seemed like jewels on a skull. | Erik Larson | ||
| 51f9319 | She was one of America's few female architects of stature, designer of a revered house in Farmington, which she named Hill-Stead. | Erik Larson | ||
| ed0fc8b | Thomas Wolfe wrote, "Here was an entire nation ... infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations." | Erik Larson | ||
| 55589f2 | Hitler had just announced his decision to withdraw Germany from the League of Nations and from a major disarmament conference that had been under way in Geneva, off and on, since February 1932. | Erik Larson | ||
| e5d3a6a | The Death of Boris,' by Mussorgsky? | Erik Larson | ||
| 664b149 | At first alienists describes this condition as "moral insanity" and those who exhibited the disorder as "moral imbeciles." They later adopted the term "psychopath"." -- | Erik Larson | ||
| e2cfac3 | All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones. | Erik Larson | ||
| 5f97938 | My dear, I find your blind admiration for me both flattering and disturbing. | Admiration | ||
| c6cbebc | Chicago's population had topped one million for the first time, making the city the second most populous in the nation after New York, although disgruntled residents of Philadelphia, previously in second place, were quick to point out that Chicago had cheated by annexing large expanses of land just in time for the 1890 decadal census. Chicago shrugged the sniping off. Big was big. Success today would dispel at last the eastern perception th.. | Erik Larson | ||
| efaa5e4 | swamp | Erik Larson | ||
| f1b0f28 | Throughout that first year in Germany, Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and of the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest. | Erik Larson | ||
| 5fb8850 | Using Holmes's instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O'Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes's body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery's central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded .. | Erik Larson | ||
| 635fa7c | Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as "a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. ... So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real." | Erik Larson | ||
| 55b539d | the club had provided for music was a lone pianist who had no idea what kind of piece might accompany such an exotic dance. Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard one note at a time: Over the next century this tune and its variations would be deployed in a succession of mostly cheesy movies, typically as an accompaniment to the sinuous emergence of a cobra from a basket. It would also drive the schoolyard.. | Erik Larson | ||
| ad5701d | In some quarters, and particularly among those who comment on these matters in in political circles or in the media or the blogosphere or other forms of public discussion, there is, without question, a strain of hostility and resentment likely to be encountered by anyone who attempts to characterize and emphasize the value of the intellectual life carried on in universities. Clearly, a wider anti-intellectualism feeds into this, something w.. | intellectuals university | Stefan Collini |