“History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), American literary critic, novelist and short-story writer. She had a sometimes tumultuous marriage with poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977), a Boston Brahmin who was bi-polar.