Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dashing around London as fast as good horses and a carriage could take them from one famous sight to another, they visited St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy, then Windsor, Bath, Oxford, and Cambridge, where the new astronomical observatory made a great impression on John Quincy. They attended art galleries and theaters. At Westminster Abbey, John Quincy was overwhelmed with “Awe and Veneration” at the monuments to the great poets, especially the inscriptions, the quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the invocation “O rare Ben Jonson.” At Drury Lane and Covent Garden, he reveled in every sort of play, from Shakespeare to Tom Thumb. His theater of the mind became a theater of the stage. The monuments to great warriors struck a different chord, for how much to love and how much to hate England was both a personal and a political negotiation. With his father, he attended the opening of Parliament. The king “made his most gracious speech from the Throne: All the Peers were in their Robes which are scarlet and white: the King’s and the Prince of Wales’s were of purple velvet.” His father years later published an account of their reception on entering the lobby of the House of Lords. The usher appeared “in the room with his long staff, and roared out with a very loud voice, ‘Where is Mr. Adams, Lord Mansfield’s friend!’; I frankly avowed myself Lord Mansfield’s friend, and was politely conducted to my place.” That distinguished jurist had not too long before told “that same house of lords, ‘My Lords, if you do not kill him, he will kill you.’” It was great political theater, and a lesson for John Quincy about the conduct and courtesies of international relations: an enemy today can become a friend tomorrow.

Really interesting book about one of the less successful American presidents, at least considered as a president – only the second (after his own father) to fail to be re-elected. But John Quincy Adams had a long political career both behind him and, uniquely, ahead of him apart from his four not very happy years in the White House; he had been the USA's diplomatic representative to the Netherlands, Prussia, Russia and the United Kingdom, a United States senator, and Secretary of State before becoming president, and then after losing re-election in 1828, went on to serve in the House of Representatives from 1831 until he had a fatal stroke at his desk in the chamber in 1848. (No living US President has ever served in the US House of Representatives; the last were the elder Bush, who served two terms more than fifty years ago, and Gerald Ford, who was a Congressman from 1949 to 1973.)

The climax of his career came in 1841, a decade after he had left the White House, when he defended the captured slaves who had taken control of the Spanish slave ship Amistad and subsequently been captured by the US coastguard; he successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the treaty with Spain which he himself had negotiated did not apply here, and exposed some embarrassing inconsistencies in the paperwork supplied by the Executive branch, as a result of which the Africans were liebrated back to Africa. He had always been viscerally opposed to slavery, though felt he could not say so out loud until near the end of his career.

Adams, like his father, left a lot of writing behind, including a lot of poetry which Kaplan integrates into the narrative. A lot of it is written to his deeply loved wife Louisa, who was born and brought up in London, though by American parents; she was the only First Lady born outside what are now the United States before Melania Trump. He was in St Petersburg during the French invasion of Russia in 1812. He negotiated the Spanish cession of Florida to the United States. He wasn't a good party politician, which is why he barely scraped into office in the Presidency (the only President apart from Jefferson to be elected by the House due to lack of majority in the electoral college). But his intellectual ability was clearly valued even by those who opposed him politically.

A good book from which I learned a lot. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is An Introduction to the Gospel of John, by Raymond E. Brown.