I was never concretely aware of the extent of anti-Semitism in the United States and in the upper levels of the State Department.

Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.

To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure.

I pride myself on having a journalistic remove.