A book should have an intellectual shape and a heft that comes with dealing with a primary subject.

Some handsome and ambitious men believe they are above all morality, and a woman's virtue becomes a mere challenge to them.

The most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you're breaking.

You don't want lopsided government. You don't want one side running roughshod over the other.

The perfect Christmas gift for a sportscaster, as all fans of sports clichés know, is a scoreless tie.

... it's Bush's baby, even if he shares its popularization with Gorbachev. Forget the Hitler 'new order' root; F.D.R. used the phrase earlier.

Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.