"‘Do you know Ovid’s poems on love?’ she said. ‘He wrote that the bedroom is the only place where you can do exactly w…"

"War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession."

"To her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds b…"

"Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only …"

"Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and h…"

"The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unkno…"

"The European upper classes...could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one …"

"For 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years, Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not …"

"‘What’s Edith Wharton like?’ ‘Just like our own barons and princelings here. Our secret world is just like hers but w…"

"He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proxim…"