Rating: ❤❤❤ “A star of the first magnitude, he rose in the night of American slavery, attracted the admiring gaze of the civilized world, and so thrilled the hearts of men that they broke the chains of all his kind in the hope of further enriching the firmament of lofty human endeavor with stars like …
Rating: ❤❤❤❤❤ First this, first that. Sometimes I’m impressed, often I’m not. Too many firsts. Maybe the “who’s first” thing has gone haywire, and the fact of someone being first in something tends to become a sacralized value in itself. (Or maybe I’m more interested in lasts.) After all, along with laudable firsts there are pathetic …
with John Bew, Martyn Frampton, Dan Jones and Claudia Renton Rating: ❤❤❤❤ Shakespeare’s Polonius said that brevity is wit’s soul, so he’d certainly bash the “limbs and outward flourishes” of my usual long-winded tedium, but I must say that, more often than not, the longest and heaviest biographies seem to be the best ones. This may …
What else can one say about Ben Franklin? Quite a lot, I’ve found. Nick Bunker’s new biography is an astute, informative and thorough delight, and I’m pleased to have had the opportunity to interview him. I had much more to address and ask about (Franklin’s remarkable ancestry, his inventions, his discoveries with the Leiden jar …
