Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

People with good intentions never give up!

Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.