The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores…

 He was killing time in that singular way that’s so delicious when you get to live in your favorite city, when even boredom can feel diverting and luxurious.

London is such a beautiful place that it can be easy, as you stroll around the city, to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder.

The American West owed its existence—as an American West—to the federal government. And the federal government owed much of the legitimacy and authority it assumed during the nineteenth century to the American West.

No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.

What a demented doctrine, that man is born evil; how cruel it is. It’s not found in Judaism; Paul made it up to explain the Crucifixion. To make sense out of Christ’s death, which in fact makes no sense.

Spanish colonizers, and later their Mexican and American counterparts, drastically underestimated and misinterpreted the depth of complexity and sophistication of Indigenous Californian societies.

Our children always grow to live in a foreign country

Four children of the same parents do not receive the same parenting.

Often we do not grasp what has happened to us until we tell someone else about it.

Humboldt never changed his mind about Berlin, insisting that the city was a ‘little, illiterate, and over-spiteful town’.

Dull people found him amusing. Interesting people thought him desperately dull.

The descendants of those who inhabited the region during that cataclysmic moment of turmoil and warfare sometimes refer to it as “the time when the stars fell.”

Those Europeans who reached across the canyon of language and culture, as curious fellow humans rather than as combatants, almost always discovered Indians willing to respond in kind. The list of such men is short

Without the stars it felt like someone had unplugged the world

Although Britain has yet to produce the quantities of superb art found on the continent, there are one or two examples of carving on bone, ivory and stone. My personal favourite is a very confident yet delicately executed horse’s head on a fragment of horse rib, found in a cave at Creswell Crags, Derbyshire.

She considered other writers aloofly. “Shakespeare,” she said reluctantly. “Perhaps Goethe,” she added, using a pronunciation of her own.

The Major had told him one day that in five years’ time no one would read any more. Later, archaeologists would ponder on, argue about, what books had been for. ‘It’ll all be telly; visual aids.’ ‘Then why are more books published every year?’

Seldom penetrated by love for mankind as I am, I sometimes feel sorry for the poor who don’t read Shakespeare

Did people then only go for the light and warmth, the coffee after the Sunday morning service and a friendly word from the vicar?