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“After all, solving a jigsaw puzzle is no fun, if you know what the picture is in advance.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Looking back, one can almost imagine them stalking through the wild with specimen bottles and outsize nets, in determined pursuit of the Ojibwa adverb or the Cherokee pronoun.”
― Margalit Fox, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind

“A scholar’s worst enemy is his own mind. Facts are slippery things. Almost anything can be proved with them, if they are correctly selected. . . .”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Though she is all but forgotten today, Alice Kober single-handedly brought the decipherment of Linear B closer to fruition than anyone before her. That she very nearly solved the riddle is a testament to the snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method. Kober was “the person on whom an astute bettor with full insider information would have placed a wager�� to decipher the script, as Thomas Palaima, an authority on ancient Aegean writing, has observed.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Magic entails both mechanical and psychological engineering, and those arts, along with the contemplative patience and manual dexterity they required,”
― Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

“THROUGHOUT THE FIRST decades of the century, scholars were following Evans’s few publications on Linear B with rapt interest. Like him, they could only speculate on what the ancient language of the tablets might have been. Just one thing seemed certain: It wasn’t Greek.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“The term cult is not itself pejorative but simply descriptive,�� the American psychologist Margaret Thaler Singer, who spent her career studying cults, has written. “A cultic relationship is one in which a person intentionally induces others to become totally or nearly totally dependent on him or her for almost all major life decisions, and inculcates in these followers a belief that he or she had some special talent, gift, or knowledge.”
― Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

“By the late nineteenth century, as British cities teemed with new inhabitants, crime rates rose and more established residents came to be afflicted with a new, urban, and distinctly modern anxiety. For the middle and upper classes, it centered acutely on the protection of property, coalescing in particular around city dwellers who were not members of the bourgeoisie. These included the working class, the poor, new immigrants, and Jews, all of whom were viewed increasingly as agents of social contagion - a threat in urgent need of containment.”
― Margalit Fox, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

“The fictitious world, to which Sherlock Holmes belonged, expected of him what the real world of the day expected of its scientists: more light and more justice. As the creation of a doctor who had been soaked in the rationalist thought of the period, the Holmesian cycle offers us for the first time the spectacle of a hero triumphing again and again by means of logic and scientific method. And the hero’s prowess is as marvellous as the power of science, which many people hoped would lead to a material and spiritual improvement of the human condition, and Conan Doyle first among them. —PIERRE NORDON, Conan Doyle: A Biography, 1966”
― Margalit Fox, Conan Doyle for the Defense: How Sherlock Holmes's Creator Turned Real-Life Detective and Freed a Man Wrongly Imprisoned for Murder

“How does a master manipulator create and sustain faith? Why do his converts persist in believing things that are patently false?—also”
― Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

“(Because Arthur had not mastered Latin grammar by the age of six, as his father before him had done, his paternal grandmother confided to Harriet her fear that the child was “a bit of a dunce.��)”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“In the. Middle Ages and afterwards, Jews, like members of other marginalized groups, were denied the legal protections that England afforded the archetypal citizen: the free white native-born law-abiding Christian adult male.”
― Margalit Fox, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

“At bottom, Conan Doyle for the Defense is a story about class identification: those snap judgments, themselves dark diagnostic instruments, that in every age are wielded to separate 'us' from 'them.”
― Margalit Fox, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

“Книга «Конан Дойль, на стороне защиты» объединяет в себе рассказ о приговоренном к казни, чью невиновность удалось доказать без современных методов судебной экспертизы, и рассмотрение уникального метода расследования, который Конан Дойль использовал в рассказах о Шерлоке Холмсе и затем применил к реальному убийству. Человек, спасший Слейтера, неслучайно был одновременно и врачом, и автором детективов: расследование, как и врачевание, основано на искусстве диагностики. Искусство это, неразрывно связанное с умением выявить, распознать и истолковать едва заметные подсказки и с их помощью реконструировать невидимое прошлое

Талант диагноста, который Конан Дойль привнес в расследование, он воспринял от своего преподавателя из медицинского колледжа, Джозефа Белла �� живого прототипа Шерлока Холмса

История долгой борьбы за освобождение Слейтера ярко демонстрирует уникальные свойства личности Конан Дойля как выдающегося человека своего времени: готовность вступить в схватку, чувство чести, которая превыше личных антипатий, и талант к рациональному расследованию, превосходящий способности полиции

То, что Слейтер не просидел в тюрьме до самой смерти, �� по большей части заслуга Конан Дойля. Расследователь, писатель и издатель, вхожий тайным посредником в коридоры высшей власти, он стал главным защитником Слейтера и сделал больше других для его освобождения, когда многие уже считали дело безнадежным. «Дело Слейтера, �� отмечал один из биографов писателя, �� позволило Конан Дойлю сыграть в Англии такую же роль, какая во Франции выпала Эмилю Золя, вмешавшемуся в дело Дрейфуса. В наши дни Конан Дойль, почитаемый как автор детективов, гораздо меньше известен как общественный деятель �� «рыцарь безнадежных дел»

Однако при всем его влиянии и усилиях ему, как он позже писал, «противостоял целый круг политических законников, которые не могли разоблачить полицию, не разоблачив самих себя».

Для Конан Дойля такое поведение, которое попирало честь и разум, две путеводные звезды его собственной жизни, было неприемлемо.


Оба они выросли в бедности. Один стал рыцарем, другой �� нет, и из неприятной переписки между ними, последовавшей в 1928 и 1929 годах, ясно, что ни один из них не мог понять другого. Здесь вся история обретает грустные тона «Пигмалиона», ибо Конан Дойль, сделавший Слейтера свободным, не мог сделать из него джентльмена

К 1920-м годам страхи буржуазии, раньше сосредоточенные на иностранцах, стали переходить на феминизм первой волны и суфражистское движение, на социализм и на дегуманизирующее влияние техники.


Фатальная ошибка, которую совершает обычный полицейский, состоит в том, что он сначала выдвигает гипотезу, а потом подгоняет под нее факты, хотя нужно сначала добывать факты, замечать разные мелкие детали и применять дедукцию, пока все собранное не начнет неудержимо влечь его�� в направлении, которое он поначалу даже не рассматривал

Расследование сродни диагностике: как и многие другие интеллектуальные занятия Викторианской эпохи, медицина и раскрытие преступлений стремятся реконструировать прошлое путем тщательного изучения ключей-подсказок.”
― Margalit Fox, Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World's Most Famous Detective Writer

“With civilization comes stuff, and with stuff comes the need to keep track of it.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“It has also been suggested that Kober’s doctors never told her precisely how ill she was. Given the low esteem in which the medical establishment of the period held patients—especially female patients—this, too, is possible.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“paucity”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“On the morning of May 16, 1950, Alice Kober died at her home in Brooklyn, at the age of forty-three. The letter to Myres is her last known to anyone. Perhaps that is fitting: For all its pulsating rage, it ends with a vision of Paradise.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“road, I walked back at 9.45 in clear moonlight from the chief”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“numismatist.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Jones would first have to prove the Spook’s fitness as a treasure-hunting guide by having him find something small, much as a devious owner salts a barren mine with gold nuggets before putting it up for”
― Margalit Fox, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History

“AND SO THE STORY ENDS, bracketed by two architects: Daedalus, who built the Minoan labyrinth, and Ventris, who found the thread that unraveled the tangle of writing unearthed there.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“It is in keeping with midcentury taboo that a serious illness would never have been named, even in correspondence with valued associates. Nor does any of the published obituaries of Kober list the cause of death, also a customary omission then. Even her death certificate sheds no light on the question:”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Every language glimmers with sparks of earlier ones. These sparks - a word, a place-name �� are residual traces of languages spoken before, often long before, in the same part of the world. Though tiny, the sparks can illuminate a history of invasion, conquest, trade, and the wholesale movement of populations.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“London in those years was a thieves�� paradise. There was no citywide police force: The London Metropolitan Police Department would be established only in 1829. The patchwork of local watchmen, marshals and constables that patrolled the city in Wild’s day proved eminently bribable: Thieves often sold their plunder directly to them, at an attractive discount, which kept them safe from the hangman’s noose. Capitalizing on prevailing conditions, Wild began to gather London’s foremost thieves around him. He set up shop in the parlor of a London tavern, where he presided over the boldly named “Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property.�� Suppose an English gentleman awoke one morning to find his gold watch and silver snuff box missing. Calling on Wild in his “office,�� he would be informed that Wild “had an idea where the goods might be found, or at least who it was that had possession of them,�� and that they could soon be returned to their rightful owner—for a fee. “If the person questioned Wild’s integrity, or asked how he should know so much about the theft, Wild answered ‘that it was meerly Providential; being, by meer Accident, at a Tavern, or at a Friend’s House in the Neighbourhood, [he] heard that such a Gentleman had his House broken open, and such and such Goods Stolen, and the like.’ �� Needless to say, Wild knew exactly where the goods were, because they’d been stolen by one of his own employees. What he’d done, in short, was to perfect a kind of property-kidnapping for ransom. The system proved so effective that he did not hesitate to target some of the country’s wealthiest men and women.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“Democratic machine.[*15] In decades that followed, women began to enter gang life, but most, like their male counterparts, were bruisers and not businesspeople. “Among the ladies, Gallus Mag, Sadie the Goat, Hell-Cat Maggie, Battle Annie…and Euchre Kate Burns, whom a newspaper called the ‘champion heavyweight female brick hurler�� of Hell’s Kitchen, were all specialists in election day mayhem,�� a historian has written: Gallus Mag, who supported her skirt with suspenders,[*16] was a mean six-foot female who, armed with a pistol and a club, was employed as a bouncer at a dive called the Hole-in-the-Wall. Sadie the Goat, a prostitute and all around rough-and-tumble fighter, ran with the Charlton Street Gang, a group of river pirates. She won her nickname by the way she would lower her head and butt like a goat in a fight��. Hell-Cat Maggie looked like an enraged tiger. Her teeth were filed to points and over her fingers she wore sharp brass spikes. Even the bravest of men lost their poise when she charged screaming into a polling place. (In a celebrated fight, she bit off the ear of Sadie the Goat.) The huge and violent Battle Annie, “the sweetheart of Hell’s Kitchen,�� was a terrifying bully. She commanded a gang of ferocious Amazons called the Battle Row Ladies Social and Athletic Club.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“On the appointed day, Robinson entered Tiffany’s alone. Approaching the diamond counter, he asked to see one large stone after another. After some time, he declared that he couldn’t decide which one to buy. He’d give the matter some thought, he said, and would return later. As the clerk returned the diamonds to their case, he noticed one was missing. Robinson was asked if he would consent to being searched. Incensed at the implication, he nonetheless agreed. No stone materialized, and he was allowed to leave. Moments later, Mary Wallenstein entered and walked to the diamond counter. She asked to see a series of small stones but, like Robinson, couldn’t settle on one. She, too, told the clerk that she would return, and promptly left the store. “There was no objection made, for there was nothing missing this time,�� a chronicler recounted. An hour later, Wallenstein presented Mrs. Mandelbaum with a single large diamond, worth $8,000.[*12] Marm’s scheme had worked brilliantly. Robinson had entered Tiffany’s with a discreet wad of chewing gum concealed in his mouth. At the diamond counter, he deftly secreted the gum beneath the countertop. Then, when the clerk’s back was turned, he palmed a large diamond and pressed it into the gum. Later, Wallenstein, standing precisely where he’d stood, felt beneath the counter, plucked out the stone and spirited it from the store.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“Amid the new Puritanism that underlay the city's reformist fervor, Fredericka Mandelbaum, a brazen immigrant Jewish woman who unabashedly did not know her place, stood little chance.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“(“I can hire one half the working class”—i.e., the Pinkertons—“to kill the other half,�� the financier and railroad magnate Jay Gould bragged.)[*”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss

“Before the Civil War, safecracking and bank burglary had been relatively rare: It was impractical, unwieldy and conspicuously loud for a man to plunder a mess of gold and then go clanking down the street—to say nothing of the strain on the poor horse that had to haul the getaway carriage. Paper, by contrast, was discreet, quiet and portable, and by its very nature had huge value proportional to weight.”
― Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss