We were suddenly getting big, with burgeoning capabilities on all sides, but very clumsy, knew we were on some kind of ride, and things changing fast, but with very little idea of what was going on.

I find her [Frances Trollope] simply delightful, even in her prejudices and cantankerousness. It is a gift to an author to find a funny, wry, perceptive contemporary observer to whom the subject matter seems almost as different and alien, and requiring as much struggling to understand, as it did to me.

John D. Rockefeller was certainly the first to create a consumer product that was sold literally throughout the entire world. Those blue 5-gallon cans showed up in some of the remotest parts of the world.

We were suddenly getting big, with burgeoning capabilities on all sides, but very clumsy, knew we were on some kind of ride, and things changing fast, but with very little idea of what was going on.

Military power tends to be a function of economic power, and the British Navy was the essential capability for establishing the imperial sway - which was attuned to furnish the raw materials for the British manufacturing ascendance. So they were mutually reinforcing.

My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance of the "West" epitomized by Cincinnati.

The evolution was always to greater scale and speed. Other countries did that here and there - GB in textiles, Germany in steel - but we went in that direction almost across the board.