Greg King > Quotes

“Many in America, as one social historian wrote, 'believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady French counts, and arrayed their poodle dogs in diamond tiaras.'...”
― Greg King (A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York)

“the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral,”
― Greg King, The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World

“harsh childhood of conflicting influences left the kaiser a bellicose braggart whose abrasive personality concealed a passionate craving for acceptance.”
― Greg King, The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World

“A family on the throne is an interesting idea,” Walter Bagehot wrote in 1867. “It brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life.” He warned, however, against too much exposure of the personal monarchy: “If you begin to poke about it, you cannot reverence it.… Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”
― Greg King, Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year

“Three years earlier, the confident superiority of the Edwardian Era, the perfectly ordered world of the Gilded Age, the invincibility of wondrous modern technology—it had all vanished one dark April night, when White Star Line’s new Titanic struck an iceberg.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“On February 4, 1915, the German government answered with its own declaration: The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be a war zone. From February 18 onward, every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. Neutral vessels will also run a risk in the war zone because, in view of the hazards of sea warfare and the British authorization of January 31 of the misuse of neutral flags, it may not always be possible to prevent attacks on enemy ships without harming neutral ships.(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“coral”
― Greg King, Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders

“Time cannot heal the wounds of the heart. Light minds might think it can, but there are [depths] which the years cannot fill, there are vacant places which can never be occupied … though the heart aches as it views the empty place, it would not have it filled by any save the one who owns it.”
― Greg King, Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year

“A flicker of sunlight” interrupted Bernard’s ruminations: at first, he thought it was a porpoise.(2) For a few seconds, he watched “spellbound” as the “long, white streak of foam” cut through the dark water toward the ship.(3) It wasn’t a porpoise: he instinctively knew what he had seen, and he closed his eyes in dread resignation. In a few seconds the torpedo struck. “The impact was terrific,” he recalled, “I could feel the ship reel, as if struck by a huge hammer.” Almost immediately, “a terrific explosion” threw “a great column of coal dust, water, and debris” over the deck. “It reminded me of the picture showing mine explosions in the trenches at the Front.”(4) Looking forward, he saw black smoke near the first funnel mingled with steam from the ship’s ventilators and coal “as if from a volcanic eruption.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Still, with its “enforced intimacy,” Lusitania was something of a social leveler.(27) In this artificial world, an otherwise peculiar blend of aristocrats and traditionalists rubbed shoulders with celebrities, industrialists, and entrepreneurs unlikely, under other circumstances, to find themselves gathered in the same social milieu. Vigorously ambitious Americans, in particular, could temporarily abandon their self-made origins and travel in all of the luxury and style their money afforded.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Complaisant, lulled into a false sense of security, Lusitania’s passengers could only hope that the Admiralty and Captain Turner would protect them, that the great liner would indeed be able to outpace any nefarious German submarine. At sea, they were largely cut off from the world, unaware of a troubling interview one German official gave in New York City a few days after Lusitania had departed. “The British flag,” he predicted, “will shortly be driven from the seas by Germany. As for the Lusitania, we will get her surely. She is not as fast as some of our latest submarines.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Yet however legitimate Schwieger’s actions, it is undeniable that in torpedoing Lusitania he made a grave mistake, if not from a legal perspective than certainly from humanitarian, political, and diplomatic ones. The attendant outcry over Lusitania’s sinking offered the world a vivid exhibition of the very worst excesses of German warfare, painting the dreaded “Huns” as barbaric murderers of innocent women and children. In this sense, as historians Bailey and Ryan wrote, Germany gained a temporary victory that was “worse than a defeat.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Schwieger was then given command of a larger boat, U-88. The following year, he received the ironically named Pour le Mérite in recognition of his gallantry and service in sinking nearly 200,000 tons of Allied shipping.(83) That fall, he took U-88 on a mission into the North Sea and, on September 5, 1917, Schwieger’s luck ran out when he struck a mine. There were no survivors: Schwieger was just thirty-two.(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“The most exclusive passengers rarely sought out new acquaintances aboard ship for fear that unwelcome intimacy and unsuspected antecedents might somehow tarnish reputations. Transatlantic liners were the known hunting ground of a particular type of scoundrel, the Arriviste, armed with enough money to buy temporary membership in this exclusive club and always on the watch for opportunities to add prominent figures to his circle of acquaintances. Post warned passengers against those who attempted to force themselves on others and struck up conversations without proper introductions. When this happened, one should immediately be on guard. A “few minutes of conversation” were sufficient to assess intent and breeding; expressions of slang, lack of decorum, and pushiness would quickly reveal someone who was “grasping, calculating, and objectionable.” If such was the case, Post advised, it was best to immediately leave or to divert one’s attention to a book or to another passenger.(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“parvenus, relied on money of questionable antecedents”
― Greg King, A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York

“Even those passengers who managed to find lifebelts, Charles Lauriat saw, had often put them on incorrectly. Never having been shown how to use them, and with the crew offering no help, they had thrust heads through armholes, put them on upside down, or tried to wear them around their waists rather than their shoulders. Lauriat calmly tried to straighten out as many as he could.(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“In 2004, she returned to Kinsale, standing on the bluff above the beach where many victims had washed ashore.(77) “I never blamed the sea,” Audrey once said of the Lusitania tragedy, “because it wasn’t the sea’s fault. It was the Germans’ fault.”(78) “I hope I’m living up to worth being saved,” Audrey commented in her last years.(79) On January 11, 2011, Audrey Lawson-Johnston died at the age of ninety-five, the last of those who had been aboard Lusitania on her final, fatal voyage.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“We don’t know in what state we shall meet again; but that we shall recognize each other and be together in eternity I am perfectly certain.”
― Greg King, Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year

“Precisely where the torpedo hit has always been a subject of some controversy. From Schwieger’s account, it seems to have struck Lusitania somewhere below the bridge, at a critical point where bulkheads separated Boiler Room No. 1 from a transverse forward cross bunker and a longitudinal bunker used for reserve coal along the ship’s starboard side. The sea rapidly flooded through the hull; bunkers meant to shield the ship’s machinery from possible damage now concentrated the flooding on the starboard side, causing an almost immediate list of some 15 degrees, a situation exacerbated by Lusitania’s great height. The sea streamed through open watertight doors, flooding into the forward bunker and cargo holds and pulling Lusitania down by the bow; it swept aft, almost immediately spilling into the forward boiler room. The ship’s continued progress through the sea forced even more water into the breach and added to the rapid flooding, as did numerous portholes that had been left open.(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“The effect was lethal and catastrophic, resulting in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people; even Schwieger later professed shock at the destruction he had caused. The man who, recalled one of his friends, described the sinking of Lusitania as “the most terrible sight” he had ever witnessed, a scene “too horrible” for him to watch, only learned just how many had died when he arrived back in Germany. A friend said he was “appalled to discover the anger of outraged humanity that his act had aroused, and horrified at the thought that he was held up all over the world as an object of odium and loathing.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“With the world in an uproar, Schwieger found himself summoned to Berlin. Despite public pronouncements that the sinking had been justified, authorities in Berlin were now on the defensive; there were rumors that Kaiser Wilhelm II personally berated him, while Admiral Tirpitz recalled that he was treated “very ungraciously” by military officials.(79) After the sinking, Schwieger seemed “so haggard and so silent and so different,” said his fiancée.(80) Yet soon he was back at sea aboard U-20, sinking more ships. In September, he torpedoed the Allan Line’s Hesperian off the Irish coast, again without warning. Thirty-two of the 1,100 aboard died when one of the lifeboats overturned during evacuation. Also aboard was a coffin holding the remains of Lusitania passenger Frances Stephens, who now fell victim to Schwieger a second time when the vessel sank the following day.(81) This time, Schwieger was ordered to apologize for having violated German assurances that no further passenger liners would be attacked without warning.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Lusitania herself hides her secrets: if a second torpedo struck her, the proof has long since been buried beneath the wreckage of collapsed decks and in an impenetrable hull whose starboard side has not been seen since May 7, 1915.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“If the diary was indeed altered, as historians have suggested, it would have been because Schwieger—and his superiors—had every reason to erase a second torpedo. After the fact, and in the face of universal condemnation, admission that Schwieger had fired a second torpedo would only have made him appear cold-blooded and bent on the deaths of all aboard. Covering up a second torpedo would also serve a dual purpose: to attribute the second explosion to illegal munitions aboard the ship and embarrass Great Britain in the ongoing propaganda war.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Not that she took to the usual ministrations that followed her husband’s death. When a cleric suggested to Victoria that “Henceforth you must remember that Christ Himself will be your husband,” the queen declared, “This is what I call twaddle!”73”
― Greg King, Twilight of Splendor: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee Year

“Famed correspondent Richard Harding Davis had been most struck by the darkness that fell over the vessel at night as lights and windows were blacked out: “You can imagine,” he wrote, “the effect of this Ritz Carlton idea of a ship wrapped in darkness.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Second Class passengers tended to adhere to a more traditional segregation of the sexes than their counterparts in Saloon Class. The Writing Room was even known by the formal designation of the Ladies’ Drawing Room. This was a suitably refined, feminine space in the Louis XVI style of light gray paneled walls, with a leaded dome over comfortable groupings of satinwood furniture, and a piano atop the rose-colored Brussels carpet.(5) As in First Class, men congregated in the adjacent Smoking Room, lined with carved mahogany paneling and topped with a white plasterwork ceiling pierced by a stained glass, barrel-vaulted skylight. Wide, blue-tinted windows opened onto the deck; one wall featured an intricate mosaic of a river scene in Brittany.(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“Emily Post warned travelers against overdressing on a liner. “People of position,” she wrote, “never put on formal evening dress on a steamer.” For a lady to wear a ball gown to dinner, she wrote, was a sure sign that she had “no other place” to show off her “finery.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“By law, Schwieger was expected to surface and fire a warning shot, demanding that Lusitania stop and allow her cargo to be searched. The commander knew that many British merchant vessels were armed with guns that could tear the hull of his submarine to pieces. Then there were the specific points under which Lusitania operated, which not only violated the Cruiser Rules but also made them obsolete that May 7. She was regularly transporting contraband, even by the British definition of the term; she operated under the sole control of the Admiralty; and she could also, should the need arise, be converted into an armed auxiliary cruiser to join the war. Lusitania was disguised, her funnels cloaked in gray, and she flew no flags. She was a non-neutral vessel in a declared war zone, with instructions to evade capture and even to ram a challenging submarine. Had Schwieger surfaced and fired a warning shot across Lusitania’s bow, does history really think that Captain Turner would have stopped the vessel and allowed a search, as demanded by the Cruiser Rules? The Admiralty’s steady erosion of the established rules of naval warfare all but ensured that, sooner or later, some unarmed passenger vessel would be torpedoed with devastating loss of life. In creating the very set of circumstances that led to Lusitania’s destruction, the Admiralty, too, must share a significant portion of the blame.”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“After more than an hour of gripping lines at the side of the boat, Holbourn was exhausted, and asked if the officer in charge would hold on to his hand so that he would not sink. The officer refused, saying that holding another man’s hand would make him “uncomfortable.”(”
― Greg King, Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age

“The fetus had not been harmed at all by the numerous stab wounds the mother received. Noguchi thought that the fetus probably lived for about fifteen to twenty minutes after its mother’s death before it, too, had died.”
― Greg King, Sharon Tate and the Manson Murders