Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.