“In 1976, even boxes of fried chicken celebrated the American Revolution.” Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (2026).
“In all of Ray Carney’s years as a fence—he had been a reluctant fence and a ruthless fence, at times imperiled by his choices and at others the embodiment of crooked intelligence—there was only one occasion when he participated in the theft itself, and that was in the summer of 1981 when Uncle Rich came back to town.” Colson Whitehead, Cool Machine (2026).
“I have lived for twenty years in the county of Lancaster, where my neighbors on all sides are ‘Pennsylvania Dutch.’” Phebe Earle Gibbons, “Pennsylvania Dutch” and Other Essays (1882).
“On 20 May 2119 I took the overnight ferry from Port Marlborough and arrived in the late afternoon at the small quay near Maentwrog-under-Sea that serves the Bodleian Snowdonia Library.” Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (2025).
“When I was six, my father took me to Grand Central Terminal in New York to see the imposing bronze statue of my great-great-great-grandfather ‘Commodore’ Cornelius Vanderbilt.” Anderson Cooper, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty (2021).
“Fran sat with her eyes closed.” Ann Cleeves, Blue Lightning (2010).
“I take my kids to church every week—well, usually.” JD Vance, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith (2026).
“Twenty past one in the morning on New Year’s Day.” Ann Cleeves, Raven Black (2006).
“As Lord Randolph Churchill lay dying in the final stages of syphilis, his mind slowly but inexorably slipping into madness, his wife Jennie wrote letters from the Bay of Bengal to her sisters.” Elisabeth Kehoe, The Titled Americans: Three American Sisters and the British Aristocratic World into Which They Married (2006).
“Ann opened her eyes and saw a pair of hands, streaked and shiny with blood.” Ann Cleeves, Red Bones (2009).
“William Cody was not always an icon of historical memory.” Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000).
“The Logia de Cerchi stood in the heart of old Florence, within a labyrinth of narrow streets behind the Badia, now rarely threaded by the stranger, unless in a dubious search for a certain severe doorplate bearing this inscription, QUI NACQUE IL DIVINO POETA.” George Eliot, Romola (1863).
“On the morning of September 26, 1792, several days of cold English rain came to an end, a light wind picked up from the north, and the HMS Lion, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line unfurled its sails and weighed anchor, to depart the harbor in Spithead.” Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.
