By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American - voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist - was firmly in place in Europe.

In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America's naive faith that it had reinvented politics.

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

If I haven't made myself clear, this worrisome chain of events describes the game of the nineteenth century.

'In the nineteenth century, we beat the British more than once,' Afghans often told me. 'In the twentieth century, we beat the Russians. In the twenty-first, if we have to, we'll beat the Americans!'

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.