Sublime

But if James’s divine right to rule was questioned by dissenters who fled his authority, it was being questioned, too, on the floor of Parliament.

Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Thomas L. Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem;

“Hemingway loves to write for those of us who will never come face to face with danger.”

In Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural, the new president appealed, eloquently but theoretically, to “the better angels of our nature.” John Lewis is a better angel. The American present and future may in many ways hinge on the extent to which the rest of us can draw lessons from his example.

the more he is like a punch-drunk pug fighting himself in the movies.

the watchword by which he edited every writer thereafter: “Don’t ever defer to my judgment. You won’t on any vital point, I know, and I should be ashamed if it were possible to have made you, for a writer of any account must speak solely for himself.

amanuensis,

We—whom Lincoln once called God’s “almost chosen people”—did

Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.