Echoes And Empires Quotes

To His Coy Mistress Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

I’ll leave my mark as you leave yours, Butterfly,” he speaks through loud, erotic sucks that echo in the bathroom. “No one will see you like I do, touch you like I do, fuck you like I do.

One thing the monks taught me was that history is not a line; it is a spiral. We don’t repeat moments in time, but we come back around, echoing them.

What a space between men their spiritual natures create! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter it? What can one know of a girl that passes, slow steps homeward, out of thoughts, she can form an empire, locked up in her language, in the singing echoes of her memory. Born yesterday of the volcanoes, of greenswards, of brine of the sea, she walks here already half divine.

In this, they echoed the views of a generation brought up to think of Britain as Great, but now doomed in peacetime to watch the American ascendancy, decolonisation, queues, bureaucracy, socialism and other perceived indignities as the Empire declined.

Perception is often stronger than reality. It is easier for us to see what we believe than it is for us to believe what we see.

You cannot take the blame for your ancestors failings any more than you can take the credit for their achievements.

Over time, it is all too common for people to lose touch with their heritage, as the thrill and immediacy of the present crowds out the echoes and lessons of the past. It would be a shame if that were to happen with respect to the fur trade. It is a seminal part of who we are as a nation, and how we came to be.

It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins. When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one, -- happiness and love.

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

One cannot exclude the possibility of a fascist period in Russia,” Staravoitova said on the radio station Echo of Moscow. “We can see too many parallels between Russia’s current situation and that of Germany after the Versailles Treaty. A great nation is humiliated, and many of its nationals live outside the country’s borders. The disintegration of an empire has taken place at a time when many people still have an imperialist mentality.… All this is happening at a time of economic crisis.

The ability of Britain to invade almost the entire planet and then for a significant portion of the country to proclaim themselves victims of some kind of invasion or colonisation may well not seem directly ‘racial’, but it certainly echoes quite clearly the way white America, with its long-term history of racist pogroms, lynching, slavery and segregation, has somehow emerged believing itself to be the victim of racial discrimination. Britain entered the EU freely, it has voted leave freely, the only blood that was shed around this issue was when a white-supremacist ultra¬ nationalist lunatic assassinated an MP perceived to be too kind to ‘immigrants’ during the campaign - hardly a country under siege like so many of those on the receiving end of Britain’s imperial conquests.

HOPE AND EXPECTATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING, THOUGH BOTH WILL LEAD TO DISAPPOINTMENT. EXIST IN THE MOMENT, ACCEPTING ALL THINGS AS THEY ARE, NOT AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM BE.

Nothing fills the air with the smoke of funeral pyres so much as loyalty.

Why do we invent the monster as a metaphor? Surely all we need do is witness our own cruelty to each other to see the real face of evil.

Because i do not travel the same road as you does not mean i am lost.

Their lives are what hold meaning. Dying is simple. Living for something is much harder.

Sorry if this little war’s inconvenienced you in any way,” Indris drawled. “I’ll try to schedule the next one with you in mind

It is ironic, in the manner of a dystopian nightmare, that an advanced capitalist empire which is founded on genocide and slavery, which still functions as the global police, which has an armed population, which routinely violates international human rights, which has the largest known military industrial complex in the world, which is the world’s largest producer of pornography, has also produced a saccharine ideology in which ‘positive thinking’ functions as a form of psychological gentrification. And it is not insignificant that the neoliberal lie that one is 110% responsible for one’s life—first powerfully encapsulated by the ‘alternative’ conservative thinker Louise Hay, and more recently echoed by Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now (1997/2005)—is directed at women. Today, gendered victim-blaming has become a form of upwardly mobile common sense ‘wisdom’. Now victimblaming is expressed by voices that sound soothing, wise, calm, above all, loving.

Sonnet: Political Greatness Nor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame, Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts, Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame; Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts, History is but the shadow of their shame, Art veils her glass, or from the pageant starts As to oblivion their blind millions fleet, Staining that Heaven with obscene imagery Of their own likeness. What are numbers knit By force or custom? Man who man would be, Must rule the empire of himself; in it Must be supreme, establishing his throne On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy Of hopes and fears, being himself alone.

EDUCATION TEACHES US HOW TO THINK, INTELLIGENCE HOW TO QUESTION, AND OUR MORALITY WHAT TO DO WITH WHAT WE KNOW. BE WARY THEN OF THE EDUCATED, INTELLIGENT, AND AMORAL PERSON, FOR THEY WILL KNOW ONLY THAT THEY CAN DO A THING, NOT WHETHER THEY SHOULD.

I do not consider myself a great artist, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-in any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

And then … music. “It began soft at first. A few notes echoing on bloodstained stone. But the chords slipped together into a bar, and the bar wove itself into a tune, and soon, I stood silent and amazed as that smattering of notes reached into the awful stillness and filled it.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

Mon wants this transition to be as peaceable as possible. That is, of course, a noble goal. And in late nights the chancellor confided in Leia that she is wisely struck by the fear of what happened the first time the parasite of Palpatine squirmed under the skin. How easy it was for him to prey on the anxieties of the galaxy. How simple it was for him to turn system against system by stoking the fires of xenophobia, anger, selfishness. (And here Luke’s voice echoes in her mind: The ways and tools of the dark side, Leia.) How do you form an Empire? By stealing a Republic. And how do you steal a Republic? By convincing its people that they cannot govern themselves—that freedom is their enemy and that fear is their ally. Palpatine

After 1,123 years and 18 days, the Byzantine Empire had drawn to a close. The Divine Liturgy that had echoed from the great dome of the Hagia Sophia for nearly a millennium fell silent, and the clouds of incense slowly cleared from the desecrated churches of the city. The shocked and shattered Byzantines were now in permanent exile, but they could at least reflect that their empire had come to a glorious and heroic end. Their last emperor had chosen death over surrender or a diminishment of his ideals, and in doing so he had found a common grave among the men he led. Proud and brave, the iconic eighty-eighth emperor of Byzantium had brought the empire full circle. Like the first to rule in the city by the Bosporus, he had been a son of Helena named Constantine, and it was fitting that in his hour of need he had a Justinian by his side.

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building.

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that’s left is the building. [Ozymandias syndrome, anyone? Ed.]

Her heart strained, and she pulled back to lift a hand to his face. Rowan read the softness in her eyes, her body, and his own inherent fierceness slipped into a gentleness that so few would ever see. Her throat ached with the effort of keeping the words in. She’d been in love with him for a while now. Longer than she wanted to admit. She tried not to think about it, whether he felt the same. Those things—those wishes—were at the bottom of a very, very long and bloody priority list. So Aelin kissed Rowan gently, his hands again locking around her hips. “Fireheart,” he said onto her mouth. “Buzzard,” she murmured onto his. Rowan laughed, the rumble echoing in her chest.

No one ever asked for peace because London was suffering. London, like a great rhinoceros, a great hippopotamus, saying: ‘Let them do their worst. London can take it.’ London could take anything. My heart goes out to the Cockneys. Any visitors we may happen to have here today – and many great nations are represented here, by all those who have borne arms with us in the struggle – they echo what I say when I say ‘Good Old London!’ . . . I return my hearty thanks to you for never having failed in the long, monotonous days and in the long nights black as hell. God bless you all. May you long remain as citizens of a great and splendid city . . . May you long remain as the heart of the British Empire.124

You’re good at this,” said Ronan. “What?” He leaned to touch the baby’s head. “Being a mother.” “What is that supposed to mean?” Ronan looked awkward. Then he said glibly, “Nothing, if you don’t like it.” He glanced at Benix, Faris, and the others, but they were discussing thumbscrews and nooses. “It didn’t mean anything. I take it back.” Kestrel set the baby on the grass next to Faris. “You cannot take it back.” “Just this once,” he said, echoing her earlier words during the game. She stood and walked away. He followed. “Come, Kestrel. I spoke only the truth.” They had entered the shade of thickly grown laran trees, whose leaves were a bloody color. They would soon fall. “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to have a child someday,” Kestrel told Ronan. Visibly relieved, he said, “Good. The empire needs new life.” It did. She knew this. As the Valorian empire stretched across the continent, it faced the problem of keeping what it had won. The solutions were military prowess and boosting the Valorian population, so the emperor prohibited any activities that unnecessarily endangered Valorian lives--like dueling and the bull-jumping games that used to mark coming-of-age ceremonies. Marriage became mandatory by the age of twenty for anyone who was not a soldier. “It’s just--” Kestrel tried again: “Ronan, I feel trapped. Between what my father wants and--” He held up his hands in flat-palmed defense. “I am not trying to trap you. I am your friend.” “I know. But when you are faced with only two choices--the military or marriage--don’t you wonder if there is a third, or a fourth, or more, even, than that?” “You have many choices. The law says that in three years you must marry, but not whom. Anyway, there is time.” His should grazed hers in the teasing push of children starting a mock fight. “Time enough for me to convince you of the right choice.” “Benix, of course.” She laughed. “Benix.” Ronan made a fist and shook it at the sky. “Benix!” he shouted. “I challenge you to a duel! Where are you, you great oaf?” Ronan stormed from the laran trees with all the flair of a comic actor. Kestrel smiled, watching him go. Maybe his silly flirtations disguised something real. People’s feelings were hard to know for certain. A conversation with Ronan resembled a Bite and Sting game where Kestrel couldn’t tell if the truth looked like a lie, or a lie like the truth. If it was true, what then?

In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder.

WE SHOULD BE DIRECTED BY REASON, OFTEN AS NOT WE ARE THE SLAVES OF APPETITE. AND THERE IS NO APPETITE SO HARD TO APPEASE AS THAT FOR DESTRUCTION.

OUR LIVES ARE MADE OF RISKS AND REWARDS. OUR ENDEAVOURS, LOVES, AND HOPES ARE ALL PRONE TO THE GREAT RISK OF FAILURE. YET TO RISK NOTHING FOR FEAR OF FAILURE IS TO LIVE IN A SHUTTERED BOX IN A WORLD WHOSE WONDERS YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.

Some specialized types of administrative legislation require further attention—for example, determinations that make law. These determinations echo the old determinations of facts, in which an executive officer determined a factual question that was a condition of a statute’s application. Rather than being exercises of mere discernment or judgment, however, the newer style determinations often include overt exercises of lawmaking will. Such determinations arise under statutes that leave plenty of room for lawmaking. For example, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is required to specify the application of the EPA’s ambient air quality standards by publishing a list of air pollutants that “in his judgment, cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”9 Although statutes of this sort speak in terms of determinations and judgments, they provide for determinations of questions so abstract or loosely stated that the agencies inevitably must engage in policy choices—in legislative will rather than mere judgment. As put by Justice Thurgood Marshall in a 1970 dissent, “the factual issues with which the Secretary [of Labor] must deal are frequently not subject to any definitive resolution,” for “[c]ausal connections and theoretical extrapolations may be uncertain,” and “when the question involves determination of the acceptable level of risk, the ultimate decision must necessarily be based on considerations of policy, as well as empirically verifiable facts.” Thus, “[t]he decision to take action in conditions of uncertainty bears little resemblance to . . . empirically verifiable factual conclusions.”10 In such instances, factual determinations become exercises of lawmaking will.

Like the Victorian English with their poetic embellishments of ‘thou’ and ‘wert’ and ‘e’en’, so the Hadrianic circle wrote in Aeolic dialect for a refined effect; it was a marker of inclusion in the inner circle. This uneasy juxtaposition of enthusiasm for an idealised ‘ancient’ civilisation and a distinct lack of enthusiasm for its present-day descendants has its echoes in the problems that the American and European Grand Tourists had with Italy, whose geography and ancient remains they loved – were it not for the drawback of its current inhabitants. Second-century elite culture and nineteenth-century romanticism were both heavily vested in a nostalgic golden past.

Is it a greater tragedy to achieve all one’s desires or to lose them all?

neither yesterday nor tomorrow exist, for everything happens in the now, and that all things share the one moment.

With every act of vengeance we murder part of ourselves.

As Rome was broadly tolerant of other religions, the token act of submission and recognition of Rome and the emperor was usually performed. This degree of pragmatism was inconceivable to Judea. They had one god and he was not a Roman emperor. Almost every aspect of Roman civic life was at war with Jewish beliefs. Jewish worship of a single god brought them into immediate conflict with the tolerant paganism of Greeks and Romans. Jews could not join the Roman army because they were unable to perform military duties on the Sabbath; Romans recalled with contempt the ease with which Pompey had originally taken Jerusalem, citing the Jews’ prioritising of religious observation over self-defence. The Romans were uneasy about Jewish circumcision, echoing the abhorrence of the practice felt by the Greeks, who disliked it largely on aesthetic grounds.

The connections to the legend of Osiris – and indeed to Christianity – were curious, with the echo of the creation of a new god, and the circumstances of Antinous’ death also echoed the superficial but alluring themes of popular Greek myths. There was Hylas, companion of Heracles and the Argonauts, who was drowned by adoring water nymphs who drew him into the spring where he had been sent to fetch water. There was Narcissus, who under Aphrodite’s curse was fatally entranced by his own reflection in the surface of a pool. Antinous the god joined the company of beautiful boys with powerful, if capricious, protectors, who met strange, watery deaths. Antinous was a perfect divinity for the second-century world of the imagination.

Darkness is the natural state of the universe. Light, fleeting, comforting as it may be, may stretch to the very edges of all we know. Yet once it is gone, the darkness always remains.

We’re all, in one way or another, the architects of the folly we now find ourselves in.

The chance for names to be words, without the burden of emotion. Or hurt. She

We all use the ahmsah to perceive and influence the ahm, the tidal flow of disentropy that flows across the ahmtesh. Our Esoteric Doctrine articulates how we perceive and stimulate natural energy to supernatural ends. Over

It’s not something easily done alone and there is no room for error.

If a happy ending is what you’re after, stop the story where it makes you smile, or cry for laughter. In life, it’s the rare sweetness to have tears of joy, or painless endings. People feel. It’s what they know, and it’s why i write.

The consequences of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul have echoed through the ages; the spread of the Romance languages, the establishment of legal institutions, imperialistic ideals as well as many other aspects of European culture all find a basis in Roman influence. The British Empire, in part justified its own expansion through emulation of the Roman concept of romanitas, the belief that they had a responsibility to spread civilization to what was otherwise perceived as a savage and barbaric world. When the armies of Hitler and Napoleon marched, they did so under imperial eagles. Even the United States has a direct correlation with Rome through its symbolic use of the eagle and a governing senate.

Here the individual experience of thinking, 'how it feels', is presented as the ultimate evidence for the nature of thought. But as I hope Chapter 2 will make clear, language is not an imitation of thought, but its condition. It is only within language that the production of meaning is possible, however much our individual experience of producing meaning is one of stumbling and panic, and of looking for adequate formulations of what seems intuitive. Of course it is true that the written text does not necessarily reproduce the empirical process of thinking, but our analysis of the nature of thought need not confine itself to the question of how it feels to think. Frye's final appeal to experience, in conjunction with his account of a thought process culminating in 'a completely incommunicable intuition' places him within the same empiricist-idealist problematic as the New Critics. And for all its claims to science and systematicity, his own theory, like theirs, is fundamentally non-explanatory. Meaning for Frye inheres timelessly in 'verbal structures', intuitively available to readers in quite different ages and places because they recognize in them the echo of their own wishes and anxieties. But the only evidence for this concept of an essentially unchanging human nature is precisely the body of literary texts which the concept apparently offers to explain. The relationship between desire and language and between language and meaning is not discussed. At the same time, Frye's theory

Love dies by steps. The footfalls of fear, resentment, anger, and spite kill love, little by little. It withers. It tarnishes. It passes away, poisoned, ill, and wounded beyond all power to heal.

She says the hunger for revenge eats a man up. She says killing doesn’t fill that hole. It just makes it echo.

The coast ran the entire length of the eastern shore of Illian: a place Mer

ON DECEMBER 8, 1941, cinemas and theaters in Japan were made to temporarily suspend their evening performances and broadcast a speech recorded by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki earlier that day. U.S. films—films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which the Japanese relished in easier times—were now officially banned. That night, audiences were confronted with the voice of a leader who hardly resembled Jimmy Stewart. Tojo was a bald and bespectacled man of middle age with no remarkable features other than his mustache. His exaggerated buckteeth existed only in Western caricatures, but he did not look like a senior statesman who had just taken his country to war against a most formidable enemy, and his voice was memorable only for its dullness. He recited the speech, “On Accepting the Great Imperial Command,” with the affected diction of a second-rate stage actor. Our elite Imperial Army and Navy are now fighting a desperate battle. Despite the empire’s every possible effort to salvage it, the peace of the whole of East Asia has collapsed. In the past, the government employed every possible means to normalize U.S.-Japan diplomatic relations. But the United States would not yield an inch on its demands. Quite the opposite. The United States has strengthened its ties with Britain, the Netherlands, and China, demanding unilateral concessions from our Empire, including the complete and unconditional withdrawal of the imperial forces from China, the rejection of the [Japanese puppet] Nanjing government, and the annulment of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. Even in the face of such demands, the Empire persistently strove for a peaceful settlement. But the United States to this day refused to reconsider its position. Should the Empire give in to all its demands, not only would Japan lose its prestige and fail to see the China Incident to its completion, but its very existence would be in peril. Tojo, in his selective explanation of the events leading to Pearl Harbor, insisted that the war Japan had just initiated was a “defensive” war. He faithfully echoed Japan’s deep-seated feelings of persecution, wounded national pride, and yearning for greater recognition, which together might be called, for the want of a better phrase, anti-Westernism. It was a sentimental speech, and it was notable for what was left unsaid.

Show me the boy who rose from nothing to become boss of the Apolli. Show me the king who built an empire from thin air. Show me the most powerful mage in this Nyx-forsaken world. Show me the soul who struggles every fucking second for sanity but still manages to rise above everyone else. And show me how much that man loves me, if he loves me at all.

It’s not a gang. It’s an empire.

Wenn sie am Leben ist, dann ist sie an dem Ort, an den sie das Schicksal geführt hat. Doch es scheint, der Ort ist weder hier noch jetzt noch bei dir.

riverbank towards her; women and children, mothers and fathers, grandparents, babies. They came with all their belongings strapped to their backs, slung over shoulders, or pulled along in makeshift carts. Some carried babies, children, and even old people on their backs. Many were very thin, dressed in filthy rags, their bodies and clothes matted with dirt. To her surprise, some of them were dressed in finery. Dinner jackets and evening gowns, now torn and streaked with mud. As they advanced along beside the river and drew level with Olive,

Zu viele Freunde waren aus seinem Leben verschwunden und hatten nur Stille hinterlassen. Nur eine war zurückgekehrt.

London, its conglomerate nature mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly footfalls in its streets of Roman feet, the honks of its departing migrant geese. Its hospitality – yes! – in spite of immigration laws, and his own recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in Wembley, a stone’s throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial echoes – Empire Way, the Empire Pool – of more than a hundred delegates, all tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village.

Beyond them fly ships with names like Spirit of Lykos, Hope of Tinos, and Echo of Ragnar. They are painted white and led by a woman with onyx-dark skin. The Lion Sovereign said the white was for spring. For a new beginning. But the ships are stained. Smeared with char and patched wounds and mismatched panels. They broke the Sword Armada and the martyr Fabii. They conquered the heart of the Gold empire. They battled back the Ash Lord to the Core and have kept the dragons of the Rim at bay.

Aelin lifted onto her toes. She felt Rowan’s eyes on her the whole time, felt his body go still with predatory focus, as she kissed the corner of his mouth, the bow of his lips, the other corner. Soft, taunting kisses. Designed to see which one of them yielded first. Rowan did. With a sharp intake of breath, he gripped her hips, tugging her against him as he slanted his mouth over hers, deepening the kiss until her knees threatened to buckle. His tongue brushed hers—lazy, deft strokes that told her precisely what he was capable of doing elsewhere. Embers sparked in her blood, and the moss beneath them hissed as rain turned to steam. Aelin broke the kiss, breathing ragged, satisfied to find Rowan’s own chest rising and falling in an uneven rhythm. So new—this thing between them was still so new, so … raw. Utterly consuming. The desire was only the start of it. Rowan made her magic sing. And maybe that was the carranam bond between them, but … her magic wanted to dance with his. And from the frost sparkling in his eyes, she knew his own demanded the same. Rowan leaned forward until they were brow-to-brow. “Soon,” he promised, his voice rough and low. “Let’s get somewhere safe—somewhere defensible.” Because her safety always would come first. For him, keeping her protected, keeping her alive, would always come first. He’d learned it the hard way. Her heart strained, and she pulled back to lift a hand to his face. Rowan read the softness in her eyes, her body, and his own inherent fierceness slipped into a gentleness that so few would ever see. Her throat ached with the effort of keeping the words in. She’d been in love with him for a while now. Longer than she wanted to admit. She tried not to think about it, whether he felt the same. Those things—those wishes—were at the bottom of a very, very long and bloody priority list. So Aelin kissed Rowan gently, his hands again locking around her hips. “Fireheart,” he said onto her mouth. “Buzzard,” she murmured onto his. Rowan laughed, the rumble echoing in her chest.

The door slammed shut behind him. I was left alone with a book and the echo of Dione’s presence – the greatest of the Alanga, and my freshly made enemy.

Here, day and night, the prettiest women of the Empire are dancing...songs and laughter echo from the golden screens. When all the others are overcome with drinking, I put down my wine. I take my brush, I wet the golden ink, and I write sad poems with swaying characters that look like these rosy bodies strewn on a marble floor.

I do not consider myself a great artict, though she made me wish I was. I could not have known at this first meeting how many times I would fail to capture her, in charcoal and in life. The brazen declaration of her; the pride in that upturned chin, the pointed nose, and the tidy carelessness that put her above the opinions of lesser men. There's little sign of her wit-so close to cruelty-ain any of the drawings I made of her, and this poor prose cannot contain her beauty, body or soul. They are only echoes, as is this.

Though they show me where I die, and take my love away from me, they can't change my destiny, these villains and their treachery.

All this is based, of course, on the resurrection. If death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant, then resurrection is the reassertion that the creator God rules over the world which the tyrants claim as their own. To speak only of ‘atonement’ in the dehistoricized and depoliticized sense of ‘Christ dying for my sins’ as a kind of private transaction, while in itself highlighting one of the majestic truths at the heart of the Christian faith (‘the son of God loved me and gave himself for me’8), is to run the risk of colluding with empire, implying that the redemption that I enjoy will enable me to escape the world where imperial powers continue to behave as they always do. Equally, of course, to imagine that we can reduce Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or Paul to terms simply of ‘politics’, as though their political stance is not non-negotiably rooted in their theology of creation, atonement and new creation, is to reduce them to echoes of our own largely impotent political posturing.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in.

Her name was Zenophir, and she was a mother who lost her daughter, and now her mothers and fathers have lost her,” Netty-P said, then raised the auto gun she’d scavenged on the surface and put three rounds into the head of the synth on the right. She did not miss.

it is a truism that some of the most passionate devotees to a cause are those that were once opposed to it and eventually came to embrace it instead.

Memory betrays most people.” Gibson’s words echoed back to me so clearly that I could see the man standing by the arched window, back stooped and face withered. “It fades, leaving them with dull, soft impressions of a life more like a dream than history.

Within the chambers of a once-barricaded heart, love’s tender whispers found echoes; together, Abdulla and Maysa painted their pain into tapestries of triumph, fortifying an Empire of Hearts.

As the American Aryan’s desire to expand across the Pacific grew, Christian ministers observed that heathen Japan needed salvation and that Japan’s seclusion policy was not God’s way. The missionary Samuel Wells Williams wrote, “I have a full conviction that the seclusion policy of the nations of Eastern Asia is not according to God’s plan of mercy to these peoples, and their government must change them through fear or force, that his people may be free.”13 In 1852, the secretary of the Navy, John Kennedy, wrote that Japan must recognize “its Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom.”14 Echoing similar arguments made earlier about Native American gold mines, the secretary of state, Daniel Webster, argued that Japan had “no right” to refuse the U.S. Navy’s “reasonable” request to commandeer Japanese sovereign soil for its coaling stations because the coal at issue was “but a gift of Providence, deposited, by the Creator of all things, in the depths of the Japanese islands for the benefit of the human family.

Trudeau’s Willy Brandt moment needs to find its British echo.

She was his adoptive daughter, obviously, but despite being wholly different species, they had a relationship as close and loving as any I’d ever seen between a parent and child.

In existing writings about federally recognized tribes and their engagement with tribal acknowledgment politics, a palpable theme is clear: presently recognized nations are not acting the ‘Indian way’ when they refuse to acknowledge their less fortunate Indian relatives and share with them. To many writers, federally recognized tribal leaders are so ensconced in the hegemonic colonial order that they are no even aware that they are replicated and reinforcing it inequities. According to this line, because the Five Tribes and related groups like the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and the Eastern Band of Cherokees have embraced nonindigenous notions of ‘being Indian’ and tribal citizenship using federal censuses such as the Dawes Rolls and blood quantum they are not being authentic. Some critics charge that modern tribes like the Choctaw Nation have rejected aboriginal notions and conceptions of Indian social organization and nationhood. This thinking, however, seems to me to once again reinforce stereotypes about Indians as largely unchanging, primordial societies. The fact that the Creek and Cherokee Nations have evolved and adopted European notions of citizenship and nationhood is somehow held against them in tribal acknowledgment debates. We hear echoes of the ‘Noble Savage’ idea once again. In other context when tribes have demanded a assay in controlling their cultural property and identities – by protesting Indian sports mascots or the marketing of cars and clothing with their tribal names, or by arguing that studios should hire real Indians as actors – these actions are applauded. However, when these occur in tribal recognition contexts, the tribes are viewed as greedy or racists. The unspoken theme is that tribes are not actin gin the ‘traditional’ Indian way…With their cultures seen as frozen in time, the more tribes deviate from popular representation, the more they are seen as inauthentic. To the degree that they are seen as assimilated (or colonized and enveloped in the hegemonic order), they are also seen as inauthentic, corrupted, and polluted. The supreme irony is that when recognized tribes demand empirical data to prove tribal authenticity, critics charge that they are not being authentically ingenious by doing so.

Not since the age of Constantine and his heirs had any one man exercised an authority over so wide a sweep of Europe as did the bishop of the ancient capital of the world. His open claim was to the ‘rights of heavenly and earthly empire’;24 his legates travelled to barbarous lands and expected to be heard; his court, in an echo of the building where the Roman Senate had once met, was known as the ‘Curia’. Yet the pope was no Caesar. His assertion of supremacy was not founded on force of arms, nor the rank of his ministers on their lineage or their wealth. The Church that had emerged from the Gregorian reformatio was instead an institution of a kind never before witnessed: one that had not merely come to think of itself as sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so.

Here, then, as Christians in the West began to go their own way, was a deep paradox: that the more distinctive a vision of the afterlife they came to have, the more it bore witness to its origins in the East. Jewish scripture and Greek philosophy, once again, had blended to potent effect. Indeed, across what had once been Roman provinces, in lands pockmarked by abandoned villas and crumbling basilicas, few aspects of life were as coloured by the distant past as the dread of death. What awaited the soul after it had slipped its mortal shell? If not angels, and the road to heaven, then demons black as the Persians had always imagined the agents of the Lie to be; Satan armoured with an account book, just as tax officials of the vanished empire might have borne; a pit of fire, in which the torments of the damned echoed those described, not by the authors of Holy Scripture, but by the poets of pagan Athens and Rome. It was a vision woven out of many ancient elements; but not a vision that Christians of an earlier age would have recognised. Revolutionary in its implications for the dead, it was to prove revolutionary as well in its implications for the living.

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

There are no victimless colonial actions: everything the British did echoes down the ages.

My meal from Honey and Hickory came with a side of dysentery straight out of Oregon Trail.’” Finn now spat out the quote against the echo of Simone’s accusation, reciting from memory a review he’d found on a late-night, liquor-fueled deep dive into all things Honey and Hickory. “That’s a direct quote from a one-star review I found for Simone’s historic family restaurant online.” Simone strode forward and claimed center stage. “Written by a disgruntled cook who was fired for never showing up to work. It hardly classifies as empirical evidence.” “Look, Ms. Blake,” he said, leaning heavy on the honorific like she had, gratified when her eyes narrowed. “Beyond Honey and Hickory’s subpar reviews, your generic flavors can’t match the nuance of Finn’s Secret Sauce. You’re a mom-and-pop barbecue joint with no soul, stuck in the past.” Directing his next words to the investors, he said, “Whereas I’m all heart, focused on the future of barbecue. Sustainable, organic, outside-the-box flavor blends.” Simone clicked her tongue. “Organic? Wow, super cutting edge. If this was 1999.” Hands on her hips, she angled away from him, toward the crowd. “Honey and Hickory was farm to table long before it was fashionable, and we cook with locally sourced meat and home-grown produce.” “Like you had anything to do with that? Your grandfather probably set up those contacts while you were in diapers.” He turned his focus on the audience; two could play at that game. “Don’t let Ms. Blake fool you. She’s been at the helm of the restaurant for less than a year, yet she’s trying to convince you she played a role in Honey and Hickory’s decades of success.

His words were echoed in the House of Lords by the former Prime Minister. William Pitt, Lord Chatham, came from a dynasty whose fortunes were made in India: his father, ‘Diamond Pitt’, brought back from his governorship of Madras the fortune that had made possible Pitt’s career. Pitt did not, however, like to be reminded of this, and now raised the alarm that the EIC was bringing its corrupt practices back from India and into the very benches of the Mother of Parliaments. ‘The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us,’ he declared at the despatch box, ‘and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruptions as no private hereditary fortune could resist.’31

No one’s more ambitious than someone who’s managed to get their foot onto the bottom rung of the wealth ladder, because from there they can see the top.

Swap you a song for your thoughts?

They’re the victors. They’ll write the history. Inconvenient truths will be forgotten soon enough.

In a 5 November leader article the West African Pilot vented its anger at Churchill’s words in the Commons: ‘That a British prime Minister could utter such a statement during an unparalleled destructive war which has cost Colonial peoples their material resources and manpower is, indeed, a revelation. What, now, must we expect our fate to be after the war?’120 Nnamdi ‘Zik’ Azikiwe, the editor of this pioneering Nigerian nationalist newspaper, also cabled Churchill requesting clarification of the discrepancy between Attlee’s statement and Churchill’s. Did the Charter apply to West Africa or not? Churchill gave instructions for a reply, which, echoing his Commons statement, claimed that the government’s Empire policy was ‘already entirely in harmony with the high conceptions of freedom and justice which inspired the joint declaration [i.e. the Atlantic Charter]’. Therefore, no fresh statement of policy on Africa was required.121 But his efforts were to no avail. In 1943 Zik travelled with a delegation to Britain and used the Charter as the basis for a demand for a timescale for complete independence.

The media largely exists in an echo chamber, where they tell themselves that they’re important and the Grand Senators believe them, because if they weren’t telling the truth it would be on the news. But if we can get out an alternate story, it will sound more believable because there’s already a strong reservoir of distrust.