Top Highlights

• I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought;
• mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to “live o’er each scene” with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life.
• the biographer must know his subject. That means reading all that he wrote as well as much that was written about him.
• to do so without falling so much under the subject’s influence
• I have had access to Henry Kissinger’s private papers,