Sublime

AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907, just a few years after Millikan’s friend Frank Jewett joined the company.11 In appearance, Vail seemed almost a caricature of a Gilded Age executive: Rotund and jowly, with a white walrus mustache, round spectacles, and a sweep of silver hair, he carried forth a magisterial

Charles H. Allen, William North Lodge of Lowell, Massachusetts, became the first governor of Puerto Rico after the US freed it from Spanish rule. A man of incredible talent, he was an accomplished artist, musician and cabinet-maker. Also an avid gardener, his home, "The Terraces," boasted showcase gardens featuring fountains, a pergola, and a

It is when he drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets paved with gold, being paved with prostrate servants; it is when he sees the grey lean leagues of Bow and Poplar that his soul is uplifted and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics.

Fifty miles north at Roi-Namur—two islands separated by a causeway as long as a hyphen—Marine Scouts took control of Koehler’s UDT 2 for a night reconnaissance of the lagoon reefs. Riding rubber boats through choppy water, they searched for mines and found none. The next day, UDT 2 attempted their own remote-controlled boat mission. This time the

Politicians boggled at two political problems that would attend the implementation of the plans: their fantastic cost and the necessity of removing from their path and relocating thousands, even tens of thousands, of voters. For years—decades—in every city in the country, the expressways remained on the drawing boards. In every city, that is,

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to