Tom Reiss Quotes

#1. Voltaire was also there, fleeing a royal arrest warrant, and working as a kind of one-man eighteenth-century USO show during the siege, offering bons mots and brandy between bouts of battle and composing odes to the military men. The

Tom Reiss

#2. But clothing themselves in the trappings of democracy, dictators may, like drag queens, tend to overdo it, and Napoleon wanted there to be no doubt that his French Republic was more democratic than any before it.

Tom Reiss

#3. Strange, how seldom a person knows which days of his life are tragic and which are happy,

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#4. (Hitler responded by calling Mussolini's movement "Kosher fascism.")

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#5. the regime had been notably anti-anti-Semitic.

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#6. Indeed, who has a greater right to public respect than the man of color fighting for freedom after having experienced all the horrors of slavery? To equal the most celebrated warriors he need only keep in mind all the evils he has suffered.

Tom Reiss

#7. The Republic can count on me to battle its enemies ... Offensive war suits the passionate character of the French, but it is the responsibility of the man in charge of leading them to prepare with caution and wisdom everything that leads to victory.

Tom Reiss

#8. The pope heard of the Knights' lax morals and sent an inquisitor to the island in 1574; he set up shop in a mansion in the shopping district.

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#9. -I'm going to heaven! I replied.
-What do you mean, you're going to heaven?
-Let me pass.
-And what will you do in heaven, my poor child?
-I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.

Tom Reiss

#10. Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another, General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home.

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#11. He also gives a good picture of the profound chaos unleashed in Muslim countries in 1924 by Ataturk's sudden abolition of the caliphate, an institution they had superficially not taken much notice of but which was central to a Muslim's whole identity.

Tom Reiss

#12. likely explanation for Elfriede's connection to Kurban Said first presented itself to me a few weeks after I visited the castle.

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#13. This gray little town fifty miles north of Paris acquired an outsized reputation for royal scandal, misbehavior, and debauchery, which in eighteenth-century France was saying something.

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#14. What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world's great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.

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#15. Dr. Barazon had maintained that Elfriede would not have needed to provide an Aryan cover for the real author of Ali and Nino, because the book contract was signed in April 1937, almost a full year before the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.

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#16. most of its existence, Mussolini's regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler's racism - probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen.

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#17. 1780, as Thomas-Alexandre turned eighteen, the king issued a new law prohibiting people of color from using the titles Sieur or Dame ("Sir" or "Madame"). Saint-Georges remained a chevalier - and Thomas-Alexandre was a count - but neither could use "Sir" before his name without risking arrest.

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#18. The former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called "Louis Capet" - a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987.

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#19. Mussolini's mistress, a leading Fascist intellectual and theorist of the movement, was openly Jewish. Perhaps less well known is that the Israeli Navy was born out of a 1930s Fascist training program, and the Duce even endowed a Fascist chair at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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#20. the Stefansplatz, where the largest spontaneous demonstration in Austrian history was held - to celebrate the Anschluss and Hitler's surprise tour of the city - in the spring of 1938.

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#21. eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini's brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.

Tom Reiss

#22. Wines, soups, desserts, dessert soups, and more wines.

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#23. The word "buccaneer" originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.

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#24. But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals

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#25. As the Iberian explorers made their way down the African coast - the Portuguese going around the Horn to East Asia, the Spaniards cutting west to the Americas - both powers had two main goals in mind: finding precious metals and planting sugarcane. (Oh, and spreading the word of God.) The

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#26. Nazism and use the alliance among Fascists to steer the Nazis away from the racial policies.

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#27. All the doors were open, all the faces were frightened; one felt that Death was there.

Tom Reiss