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“... the imagination of students at Caltech. Here was the Sane Scientist – the heir of Benjamin Franklin. Feynman appears several times in Ed Regis’s wonderful book about the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (the members of which often appear in the Mad Scientist mode) as an advocate of worldly engagement. His words head an epilogue which asks ...”

“... have for you,’ reads the typing primer; you can see it in cross-stitches, can’t you? Benjamin Franklin would be proud. ‘It’s easy to be clean on the outside,’ murmurs a demonic Shirley Temple in baggy shorts and lanyard. ‘All you need is soap and water and a scrubbing brush. It’s much harder to be clean on the inside.’ Among all this awful ...”

“... dined with Cassius Clay, as he then was, and was hired, unavailingly, to give a name to a new Ford car. On the whole people think rather little of the poems she wrote after about 1936, although she published many more before her death in 1972. What the letters tell about her is that however one divides her long life into periods there is from the outset ...”

“... Merze Tate (PhD Radcliffe 1941) – though he also notes the contributions of the historians E. Franklin Frazier (PhD Chicago 1931) and Eric Williams (PhD Oxford 1938), who taught at Howard before returning to Trinidad in the late 1940s. Of the main four, all but Tate – the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in this field – are today ...”

“... dinner but itself became the new social élite. Idols of production like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford appear rarely here, and the old family New Yorkers found early in the century give way by the Twenties to idols of consumption from show business and journalism. Taking root in the informal Algonquin club of writers, in Vanity Fair and in the new (in ...”

“... his prentices. The renegade or maverick Englishmen with whom they allied themselves – Ford, and at another level A.R. Orage – shared this un-English conviction and habit.’ Yet it does not seem from this book that any of these writers did convert this conviction into a habit. Where did the studios flourish, who were the masters and who the ...”

“... a successful conquest of the North. Freeman’s biography was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1935. Franklin Roosevelt hailed Lee as ‘one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen’. When the US navy launched its new fleet of ballistic missile submarines in the 1950s, the USS Robert E. Lee was the third commissioned ...”

“... 1976 had taken place in the shadow of Watergate, presided over by an unelected president, Gerald Ford, brought in first to replace a besmirched vice president, Spiro Agnew, and then a disgraced President Nixon. Commentators discussed whether democracy was compatible with what was now being termed an ‘imperial presidency’ (the title of an influential book ...”

“... historical celebrities. They have barely set foot in Philadelphia before they bump into Benjamin Franklin, posing around in ‘Spectacles of his own Invention, for moderating the Glare of the Sun’. And then of course they are asked round for tea by Col. George Washington, you know, the land-surveyor and real-estate speculator, eager for his own reasons to ...”

“... offshoots – or contracts for organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Ford Foundation, which seemed at first to exist for scarcely any purpose other than to further US foreign policy and provide cover for the CIA’s machinations. Ford’s present reputation and munificence in Asia, Africa and ...”

“... embraced a ‘particularly demanding notion of corruption’. The diamond snuffbox that Benjamin Franklin brought back from France, a present from Louis XVI, troubled Congress: a gift wasn’t necessarily a bribe, but it could become one. Laws governing how much money individuals and organisations could give to politicians were prophylactics, designed ...”

“... is very, very boring, but at least no one raps in it, though you get the sense that Ben Franklin might have tried – in French. However, there are two scenes that flare to life. The first comes during ‘Momma Look Sharp’, which is sung by a 15-year-old boy, slain by the British, who lies in the killing fields and who will not rise again after ...”

“... always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’ ‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’ ‘I did, yes. There was a ...”

“... he himself had innovated. It’s as though Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”

“... the poems by hand, then typed them up on a borrowed Hammond typewriter. This machine, as Ralph Franklin explained in The Editing of Emily Dickinson (1967), was ‘one of the earliest to have small letters as well as capitals’ and allowed Todd to remain faithful to Dickinson’s idiosyncratic capitalisation. When she was forced to return the Hammond she ...”