Sublime

The man who would be drawn in cartoons, mocked in gossip columns, celebrated in drawing rooms, sought out by enthusiasts – the man at the centre of a famous club of thinkers, writers, politicians, and scholars, who was generally regarded with the bemused awe and wonder owed to a celebrity intellectual – appears in the letters of his late twenties a

North had worked for the arms-length, extra-judicial, extra-governmental agency known as the Board for four years. He was going to die young – the bullet guaranteed it. He told them he wanted to do something useful with the time he had left. And they took him at his word.

The Battle of the Bulge was Ike’s finest hour as a military commander.

Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who someh

When generals in Europe were disappointed in decisions made at SHAEF, they usually blamed Bedell rather than Ike. So, too, in Washington. Politicians of both parties focused their ire on Sherman Adams when their requests were denied by the White House.

There was an unspoken dignity, an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity. Aside from relatives, old friends from college, and senior statesmen whom he had known—men like Josephus Daniels and Al Smith—Louis Howe was the only person to call him Franklin.

After the campaign, Moses himself would say that Lehman “was essentially a cautious, dependable citizen of the old school” who “carried on the work of Smith and Roosevelt without basic innovation” but who was “enormously conscientious and hard-working…. I would classify him as a distinguished Governor.” Herbert Lehman, Robert Moses would say after

Hill genuinely cared about quality rail service and about public opinion.

Montgomery visited every unit going ashore on D-Day, American as well as British and Canadian, encouraging the men to break ranks and gather around while he told them what an honor it was to command them. “General Eisenhower is the captain of the team, and I am proud to serve under him,” said Monty. By his own reckoning, Montgomery estimated that h