The Gift of the Jews

This is a series on cultural impact, … I’m not writing an introduction to Judaism, or even the Bible.

I would like to restore, to the West, its genealogy, … We have less and less history and it seems to me if you don’t know where you came from you’re an orphan and you...

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination –...

Every one of these books is going to have one really big surprise in it to make people say, ‘I didn’t realize that,’

We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God’s fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for ‘the bush was not consumed.

Previous research has shown that every spring there are massive dust storms in Asia that transport soil eastward to Japan and across the Pacific to the United States. Now we’ve found that sulfate and organic...

Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, … That’s when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.

Someone told me early on that whenever you get a question that you don’t like, say, ‘That reminds me …’ and go off on whatever you feel like, … No one will ever bring you...

It must be hell on a writer who is introverted and doesn’t really want to talk to people,

One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don’t get through these books, … If people don’t finish your...

We think we know what history is. We think we know what happened and we don’t.