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" 'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.' "

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" Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn't exist in America in 1940. The word 'conservative' was associated primarily with fringe groups - anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League. "

Tom Reiss

Liberty

America

Deal

" The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century. "

" When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake. "

" I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that's going on today. "

" The one thing I'm not tempted to ever do is stop working. Retirement would be too tough for me. As a workaholic and an insomniac, I identified with my subject, General Dumas, who, according to field reports, would ride on patrols without sleep sometimes for two nights on end before going into battle - and winning. "

" The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them. "

" The revolution breaks out; they form this group of swordsmen called the Black Legion. Alex Dumas is there at every moment, protecting the revolution and protecting France, and he rises to the equivalent of a four-star general. "

" The Jewish exodus from North Africa, in the late nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, brought hundreds of thousands of Algerian, Moroccan, and Tunisian Jews to France. "

" In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he'd had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of 'Judaizing.' "

" My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough. "

" For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times. "

Tom Reiss

Interesting

History

" For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans. "

" One of my most persistent, long-term fantasy wishes is not that I could fly or become invisible, but that I could make sound recording be invented decades or even centuries earlier than it was, so I could hear what people in the 1830s or 1750s actually sounded like. "

" In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East. "

" Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal. "

" Alexandre Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie - father of the future Alex Dumas - was born on February 26, 1714, in the Norman province of Caux, a region of rolling dairy farms that hung above great chalk cliffs on the northwest coast of France. "

" I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era. "

Tom Reiss

Dress

I Am

" The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting. "

" Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger. "

" By comparison, 'The Secret Agent' is not especially prescient about terrorism, certainly not technically. The Professor was a stock figure of Edwardian fiction, and his dreams of mass destruction were nothing ahead of their time. Many novels in the late 19th and early 20th centuries involved plots far more deadly. "

Tom Reiss

Nothing

Late

" The French Revolution ends slavery unilaterally. And it does so at this moment when the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Americans - all of the other major powers - keep slavery. And the fact is that it's almost bankrupting the French Colonial Empire. "

" Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now. "

" Napoleon's plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes - the despotic local rulers - with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics. "

" The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me. "

" Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich. "

" The original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of 'Antoine Alexandre de l'Isle,' in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. "

" In 'The World Set Free,' the world's major superpowers attack each other simultaneously. "

" It was nearly midnight on the night of February 26, 1806, and Alexandre Dumas, the future author of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and 'The Three Musketeers,' was asleep at his uncle's house. He was not yet four years old. He was staying there because his father was gravely ill, and his mother thought it best for him not to be at home. "

" Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix. "

" The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century - and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids. "