“Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk.” Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2026).
“Twilight arrived early in the Crimean mountains, with dusk falling at four thirty and darkness shortly thereafter.” Giles Milton, Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World. (2021).
“At last on Monday around ten or half past, Sybil Van Antwerp carries the mug of Irish breakfast tea with milk to her desk.” Virginia Evans, The Correspondent (2025).
“If historians were asked to identify the greatest human tragedies of all time, the Holocaust would probably top the list, for reasons both powerful and plausible.” Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding (2025).
“This is the story of three girls who were born in one world and sent, by forces beyond their comprehension, to grow up in an entirely different one.” Janice P. Nimura, Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back.
“‘Do you know, when I was a child, it was the lavatory to which I retired for quiet meditation.’” Amanda Chapman, Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library (2025).
“Maralyn looked out at emptiness.” Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (2025).
“It was a muggy late-summer day in 1979 when I stepped out of the Shanghai heat into the cool marble lobby of the Peace Hotel.” Jonathan Kaufman, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China (2020).
“This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.” Niall Williams, Time of the Child (2024).
“After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had as a writer.” Michael Lewis, ed, Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service (2025).
“Our story starts, appropriately enough, with a bang: the whizz of shells, the crack of gunfire.” Jeremy Dauber, American Comics: A History (2022).
“A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun.” Karen Russell, The Antidote (2025).
“At some point in the afternoon of 17 July 1937, a tall, round-faced Ukrainian in his late thirties, whose bright eyes contrasted vividly with his smooth black hair, sat down in a hotel room in Paris to write a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union.” Josh Ireland, The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy (2026).
“When John Foster Dulles died on May 24, 1959, a bereft nation mourned more intensely that it had since the death of Franklin Roosevelt fourteen years before.” Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War.
