"Within twenty-four hours Captain Kendall would discover that his ship had become the most famous vessel afloat and that he himself had become the subject of breakfast conversation from Broadway in New York to Piccadilly in London. He had stepped into the intersection of two wildly disparate stories, whose collision on his ship in this time, the end of the Edwardian era, would exert influence on the world for the century to come" (The Mysterious Passengers, p. 5).

"It was not precisely a vision, like some sighting of the Madonna in a tree trunk, but rather a certainty, a declarative sentence that entered his brain...Later Marconi would say there was a divine aspect to it, as though he had been chosen over all others to receive the idea" (Part I, Ghosts and Gunfire, p. 15).

"As the end of the century approached, a question lay in the hearts of...