Come down the Danube through a “painters’ paradise” of low hills, past a “bosky island,” around a bend where suddenly the spires and parapets and bustling quays spread before you “in a pearly, blue-gray light.” Glimpse the Royal Castle, its
John Randolph (1773-1833) survives in America’s footnotes as a colorful contrarian, and the Gore Vidal school of historiography pants at his duel with Henry Clay and his taste for opium. A master rhetorician, he left a long list of choice
“Each social class has its own pathology.”
—Proust
Going by the tide and subtitle alone, it would appear that this is either a book about the lies rich people tell each other, or a book transforming the jingle of