“
I had a tattoo once,” said Kaidan. “Last year, just before we left England.”
“What do you mean, you had one 'once'?”
“Bloody thing was gone by the morning!” His voice was indignant. “Sheets were black with ink. I put myself through all of that for hours, and my body just pushed it back out!”
And once again we were both in a fit of hysterics, sharing the world's best inside joke. We were doubled over, unable to breathe, and I accidentally snorted. Kaidan pointed at me and laughed harder, clutching his stomach.
“What was your tattoo?” I managed to push the words out.
“You had to ask. It was a deadly-looking pair of black wings on my shoulder blades.”
Kaidan and I started roaring again, muscles clenching from the exertion.
We had no way of knowing it would be our last reason to laugh for a very long time.
”
”
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Evil (Sweet, #1))
“
Something is very wrong with Bunce. She's collapsed in the back seat like a dead rabbit. But I can't really focus on it because of the sun and also the wind and because I'm very busy making a list.
Things I hate, a list:
1. The sun.
2. The wind.
3. Penelope Bunce, when she hasn't got a plan.
4. American sandwiches.
5. America.
6. The band, America. Which I didn't know about an hour ago.
7. Kansas, also a band I've recently become acquainted with.
8. Kansas, the state. Which isn't that far from Illinois, so it must be wretched.
9. The State of Illinois, for fucking certain.
10. The sun. In my eyes.
11. The wind in my hair.
12. Convertible automobiles.
13. Myself, most of all.
14. My soft heart.
15. My foolish optimism.
16. The words "road" and "trip" when said together with any enthusiasm.
17. Being a vampire, if we're being honest.
18. Being a vampire in a fucking convertible.
19. A deliriously thirsty vampire in a convertible at midday. In Illinois, which is apparently the brightest place on the planet.
20. The sun. Which hangs miles closer to Minooka, Illinois, than it does over London blessed England.
21. Minooka, Illinois. Which seems dreadful.
22. These sunglasses. Rubbish.
23. The fucking sun! We get it - you're very fucking bright!
24. Penelope Bunce, who came up with this idea. An idea not accompanied by a plan. Because all she cared about was seeing her rubbish boyfriend, who clearly cocked it all up. Which we all should have expected from someone from Illinois, land of the damned - a place that manages to be both hot and humid at the same time. You might well expect hell to be hot, but you don't expect it to also be humid. That's what makes it hell, the surprise twist! The devil is clever!
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
“
Oh, my dear, love isn't always the coup de foudre--the lightning strike. Sometimes it happens quietly, so quietly you may not even notice.
”
”
Julia Justiss (Convenient Proposal to the Lady (Hadley's Hellions #3))
“
They might have beaten us at our national sport, but we managed to beat them at their national sport twice in the 20th century. [Replying to Kenneth Clarke, who said, "Isn't it terrible about losing to the Germans at our national sport?" when England lost to Germany in the 1990 FIFA World Cup Semi-final.]
”
”
Margaret Thatcher
“
These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.
In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.
”
”
T.H. White (The Sword in the Stone (The Once and Future King, #1))
“
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing.
That they lost France and made his England bleed.
”
”
William Shakespeare (Henry V)
“
in that small [time] most greatly lived this star of England:
Fortune made his sword, By which the world's best garden he achiev'd
And left it to his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crown'd King
of France and England did this King succeed;
Whose state so many of had the managing,
That they lost France and made his England bleed.
”
”
William Shakespeare (Henry V)
“
Tell me, what kind of woman managed to land the most decorated soldier in England?'
'The kind who cares nothing for medals or laurels.'
Giving him a frankly disbelieving glance, Fenwick said, 'How can that be true? Of course she cares about such things. She is now the wife of an immortal.'
Christopher stared at him blankly. 'Pardon?'
'...warriors are revered. They are never forgotten.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
And so this added consideration - that she never get pregnant - contributed to the moderation of their coupling, which was almost always managed under conditions harsh enough to win the approval of New England's founding fathers
”
”
John Irving (The Cider House Rules)
“
Pandora was an unconventional girl: impulsive, intelligent, and usually filled with more energy than she seemed able to manage. Of all the three Ravenel sisters, she had been the least likely to marry the most eligible bachelor in England. However, it spoke well of Gabriel, Lord St. Vincent, that he was able to appreciate her. In fact, from all accounts, St. Vincent had gone head over heels for her.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Devil's Daughter (The Ravenels, #5))
“
On deck, he encountered another young man, Thomas Sumner, of Atherton, England, who also had a camera. (Sumner bore no relation to Cunard’s New York manager, Charles Sumner.) Both hoped to take photographs of the harbor. The day was cool and gray—“rather dull,” as Sumner put it—and this caused the two to wonder what exposures to use. They fell to talking about photography.
”
”
Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
“
I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.
Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.
In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal.
Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death.
For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.
At least you used to.
But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.
”
”
Peter Godwin (When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa)
“
You know, Junie, you're fourteen now. I think you can certainly manage to put together a sandwich. ...
The thing is, if my mother had any idea what I had in my backpack, she would have made me that sandwich. If she knew that I'd searched and searched the house until I finally found the little key to the fireproof box buried in the bottom of her underwear drawer, if she knew that I'd unlocked the box and taken my passport out, that I had it with me right that very second in a Ziploc bag in the bottom of my backpack, if she knew why I had it there, if she knew even a bit of all that, she might have made me that PBJ. She wouldn't have said, "You're fourteen now," like she thought I was some kind of responsible adult. No. If she knew about my plan, she would have said, "you're only fourteen." She would have told me that I was crazy to think about going to England with I was only fourteen.
”
”
Carol Rifka Brunt (Tell the Wolves I'm Home)
“
Is it awful to join in this planning? Is it trying to sell one’s sister? But surely Rose can manage to fall in love with them — I mean, with whichever one will fall in love with her. I hope it will be Neil, because I really do think Simon is a little frightening — only it is Neil who thinks England is a joke.
”
”
Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)
“
Matilda managed to present William with ten children, which she probably could not have done had she been just over four feet tall.
”
”
Alison Weir (Queens of the Conquest (England’s Medieval Queens #1))
“
You have a freckle,” he murmured. “Right” – he leaned down and dropped a light kiss near the inside of her elbow – “here.”
“You’ve seen it before,” she said softly. It wasn’t in an immodest spot; she had plenty of frocks with short sleeves.
He chuckled. “But I’ve never given it it’s proper due.”
“Really.”
“Mmm-hmm.” He lifted her arm, twisting it just a bit so that he could pretend to be studying her freckle.
“It is clearly the most delightful beauty mark in all of England.”
A marvelous sense of warmth and contentment melted through her. Even as her body burned for his, she could not stop herself from encouraging his teasing conversation.
“Only England?”
“Well, I haven’t traveled very extensively abroad…”
“Oh, really?” “And you know…” His voice dropped to a husky growl.
“There may be other freckles right here in this room. You could have one here.” He dipped a finger under the bodice of her nightgown, then moved his other hand to her hip.
“Or here.”
“I might,” she agreed.
“The back of your knee,” he said, the words hot against her ear
. “You could have one there.”
She nodded. She wasn’t sure she was still capable of speech.
“One of your toes,” he suggested.
“Or your back.”
“You should probably check,” she managed to get out.
He took a deep, shuddering breath.
”
”
Julia Quinn (Because of Miss Bridgerton (Rokesbys, #1))
“
I incline toward things stripped of any chance of ending or surviving. So you will understand why I have always been concerned with the West. This concern seemed to you absurd or gratuitous. “The West—you aren’t even part of it,” you pointed out. Is it my fault if my greed for misery has not found another object? Where else will I find so persistent a will to fail? I envy the West the dexterity with which it manages to die out. When I would fortify my disappointments, I turn my mind toward this theme of an inexhaustible negative richness. And if I open some history of France, England, Spain, or Germany, the contrast between what they were and what they are gives me, besides a certain vertigo, the pride of having discovered, at last, the axioms of twilight.
”
”
Emil M. Cioran (Some Blind Alleys: A Letter)
“
Antananarivo is pronounced Tananarive, and for much of this century has been spelt that way as well. When the French took over Madagascar at the end of the last century (colonised is probably too kind a word for moving in on a country that was doing perfectly well for itself but which the French simply took a fancy to), they were impatient with the curious Malagasy habit of not bothering to pronounce the first and last syllables of place names. They decided, in their rational Gallic way, that if that was how the names were pronounced then they could damn well be spelt that way too. It would be rather as if someone had taken over England and told us that from now on we would be spelling Leicester 'Lester' and liking it. We might be forced to spell it that way, but we wouldn't like it, and neither did the Malagasy. As soon as they managed to divest themselves of French rule, in 1960, they promptly reinstated all the old spellings and just kept the cooking and the bureaucracy.
”
”
Douglas Adams (Last Chance to See)
“
OH, poor Ira!” Nancy Drew exclaimed and slowed her convertible. The two girls with her turned to look toward the sidewalk. Trudging along was an elderly mail carrier. He was lugging a heavy bag over one shoulder. His head was down and his eyes were almost closed against the strong November wind that swirled leaves and dirt around him. “Mr. Nixon!” Nancy called out of her open window. “Let me give you a ride.” The mail carrier looked up and managed a smile. “Hello, Nancy,” he said. “Thank you, but I have to stop at every house. Lots of letters today. There’s one in the bottom of my bag for you. It was sent air mail from London, England.” “How exciting!” Nancy said. “Well, I’ll see you at the house.” She added, “I’ll have some hot cocoa waiting for you.” Mr. Nixon smiled and Nancy drove on.
”
”
Carolyn Keene (Nancy's Mysterious Letter (Nancy Drew, #8))
“
As Sloan approached the door, Paul Lyons lifted his eyes to watch her leave. He found himself wondering why after all these years they couldn’t manage to get along for a lousy twenty minutes. Perhaps it was the result of their inability to compromise—to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Or maybe they’d both simply lost the ability to trust another human being and believe anything good could come of this world.
”
”
Kaylin McFarren (Banished Threads (Threads #3))
“
Arthur managed to speak to his grandmother [Queen Eleanor of England], demanding that she evacuate the castle with all her possessions and then go peaceably wherever she wished, for he wanted to show nothing but honour to her person. The Queen replied that she would not leave it, but if he behaved as a courtly gentlemen, he would quit this place, for he would find plenty of castles to attack other than the one she was in.
”
”
Alison Weir (Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (World Leaders Past & Present))
“
For all the wonders of ancient Athens, or rather because of them, I faced a fundamental question. How was it that this tiny community of 200,000 souls or so (in other words, no more populous than, say, York in England or Little Rock in Arkansas) managed to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human endeavor and to create one of the greatest civilizations in history? Indeed, it laid the foundations of our own contemporary intellectual universe.
”
”
Anthony Everitt (The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World's Greatest Civilization)
“
It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body. But it’s not really possible to adopt a stance of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don’t really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five. Quite rightly, some take me up on it. I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too. And yet I had absolutely invited the question. Telling someone else, with deliberate realism, that once I’d had a few more scans and treatments I might be told by the doctors that things from now on could be mainly a matter of “management,” I again had the wind knocked out of me when she said, “Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.” How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said myself. But again there was the unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self–centered and even solipsistic.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Mortality)
“
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned King
Of France and England, did this king succeed;
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed;
Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take.
”
”
William Shakespeare (Henry V)
“
Furthermore—”
“There’s a ‘furthermore’?” His voice was utterly inflectionless.
“—I’m not a child. I’m a lady born of one of England’s finest and oldest families, and I daresay even you know how to behave in the presence of a lady. Regardless of the inconvenience I’ve caused you, I’ll thank you to remember whatever manners you’ve managed to feign to date, because the ones you’re exhibiting do you no credit and merely reinforce the prevailing opinion, Captain Flint, that you are a savage.” She delighted in giving the S a serpent-like sibilance. “The measure of a gentleman is how he behaves when he hasn’t an audience to witness the beauty of his manners. And I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, my lord, but centuries of fine breeding have ensured that I need not, as you say, exert myself if I choose not to. Only the likes of you equate the actual need to work with virtue. It is in fact due to the work of my ancestors that I no longer need to, and my family considers this a mark of honor.
”
”
Julie Anne Long (I Kissed an Earl (Pennyroyal Green, #4))
“
When we land at a place like London Airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish. It is more beautiful and more complex than anything we could have dreamed of, but we are concerned only to let people see that we can manage and we are not overawed. We might even pretend that we had expected better. That is the nature of our stupidity and incompetence. And that was how I spent my time at the university in England, not being overawed, always being slightly disappointed, understanding nothing, accepting everything, getting nothing. I saw and understood so little that even at the end of my time at the university I could distinguish buildings only by their size, and I was hardly aware of the passing of the seasons. And yet I was an intelligent man and could cram for examinations.
”
”
V.S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River)
“
Most of this fixation was easy to explain. Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal haven’t really had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no longer surprises the rest of us: passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflatable bananas. Managers, coaches and therefore players now favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another, the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed all, football fans regret this. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing. It was nice to watch, football’s prettiest accessory (a good player could pass to a team-mate we hadn’t seen, or find an angle we wouldn’t have thought of, so there was a pleasing geometry to it), but managers seemed to feel that it was a lot of trouble, and therefore stopped bothering to produce any players who could do it. There are still a couple of passers in England, but then, there are still a number of blacksmiths.
”
”
Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch)
“
Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.
”
”
Santayana George 1863-1952 (Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies)
“
The eccentric passion of Shankly was underlined for me by my England team-mate Roger Hunt's version of the classic tale of the Liverpool manager's pre-game talk before playing Manchester United. The story has probably been told a thousand times in and out of football, and each time you hear it there are different details, but when Roger told it the occasion was still fresh in his mind and I've always believed it to be the definitive account. It was later on the same day, as Roger and I travelled together to report for England duty, after we had played our bruising match at Anfield. Ian St John had scored the winner, then squared up to Denis Law, with Nobby finally sealing the mood of the afternoon by giving the Kop the 'V' sign. After settling down in our railway carriage, Roger said, 'You may have lost today, but you would have been pleased with yourself before the game. Shanks mentioned you in the team talk. When he says anything positive about the opposition, normally he never singles out players.' According to Roger, Shankly burst into the dressing room in his usual aggressive style and said, 'We're playing Manchester United this afternoon, and really it's an insult that we have to let them on to our field because we are superior to them in every department, but they are in the league so I suppose we have to play them. In goal Dunne is hopeless- he never knows where he is going. At right back Brennan is a straw- any wind will blow him over. Foulkes the centre half kicks the ball anywhere. On the left Tony Dunne is fast but he only has one foot. Crerand couldn't beat a tortoise. It's true David Herd has got a fantastic shot, but if Ronnie Yeats can point him in the right direction he's likely to score for us. So there you are, Manchester United, useless...'
Apparently it was at this point the Liverpool winger Ian Callaghan, who was never known to whisper a single word on such occasions, asked, 'What about Best, Law and Charlton, boss?'
Shankly paused, narrowed his eyes, and said, 'What are you saying to me, Callaghan? I hope you're not saying we cannot play three men.
”
”
Bobby Charlton (My Manchester United Years: The autobiography of a footballing legend and hero)
“
For American Catholics, a millennium that John Paul II had hailed as a “new springtime” for Christianity began instead with a wave of revelations about priestly sex abuse. There had been intimations of this crisis in the 1980s, when several high-profile instances of priestly pedophilia had surfaced in the media. But nothing prepared Catholic America for the flood of 2003, which began in New England but ultimately left no diocese or community untouched, reaching even to the doors of the Vatican itself. Horror upon horror, cover-up upon cover-up, and sacrilege piled on sacrilege—it was like an anti-Catholic polemic from the nineteenth century, except that it was all too terribly true. No atheist or anticlericalist, no Voltaire or Ingersoll or Twain could have invented a story so perfectly calculated to discredit the message of the Gospel as the depredations of Thomas Geoghan and the legalistic indifference of Bernard Cardinal Law. No external enemy of the faith, no Attila or Barbarossa or Hitler, could have sown so much confusion and dismay among the faithful as Catholicism’s own bishops managed to do.
”
”
Ross Douthat (Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics)
“
I had tracked down a little cafe in the next village, with a television set that was going to show the World Cup Final on the Saturday. I arrived there mid-morning when it was still deserted, had a couple of beers, ordered a sensational conejo au Franco, and then sat, drinking coffee, and watching the room fill up. With Germans. I was expecting plenty of locals and a sprinkling of tourists, even in an obscure little outpost like this, but not half the population of Dortmund. In fact, I came to the slow realisation as they poured in and sat around me . . . that I was the only Englishman there. They were very friendly, but there were many of them, and all my exits were cut off. What strategy could I employ? It was too late to pretend that I was German. I’d greeted the early arrivals with ‘Guten Tag! Ich liebe Deutschland’, but within a few seconds found myself conversing in English, in which they were all fluent. Perhaps, I hoped, they would think that I was an English-speaker but not actually English. A Rhodesian, possibly, or a Canadian, there just out of curiosity, to try to pick up the rules of this so-called ‘Beautiful Game’. But I knew that I lacked the self-control to fake an attitude of benevolent detachment while watching what was arguably the most important event since the Crucifixion, so I plumped for the role of the ultra-sporting, frightfully decent Upper-Class Twit, and consequently found myself shouting ‘Oh, well played, Germany!’ when Helmut Haller opened the scoring in the twelfth minute, and managing to restrain myself, when Geoff Hurst equalised, to ‘Good show! Bit lucky though!’ My fixed grin and easy manner did not betray the writhing contortions of my hands and legs beneath the table, however, and when Martin Peters put us ahead twelve minutes from the end, I clapped a little too violently; I tried to compensate with ‘Come on Germany! Give us a game!’ but that seemed to strike the wrong note. The most testing moment, though, came in the last minute of normal time when Uwe Seeler fouled Jackie Charlton, and the pig-dog dolt of a Swiss referee, finally revealing his Nazi credentials, had the gall to penalise England, and then ignored Schnellinger’s blatant handball, allowing a Prussian swine named Weber to draw the game. I sat there applauding warmly, as a horde of fat, arrogant, sausage-eating Krauts capered around me, spilling beer and celebrating their racial superiority.
”
”
John Cleese (So, Anyway...: The Autobiography)
“
HST: Yeah, I’d do almost anything after that, even run for President—although I wouldn’t really want to be President. As a matter of fact, early on in the ’72 campaign, I remember telling John Lindsay that the time had come to abolish the whole concept of the presidency as it exists now, and get a sort of City Managertype President…. We’ve come to the point where every four years this national fever rises up—this hunger for the Saviour, the White Knight, the Man on Horseback—and whoever wins becomes so immensely powerful, like Nixon is now, that when you vote for President today you’re talking about giving a man dictatorial power for four years. I think it might be better to have the President sort of like the King of England—or the Queen—and have the real business of the presidency conducted by… a City Manager-type, a Prime Minister, somebody who’s directly answerable to Congress, rather than a person who moves all his friends into the White House and does whatever he wants for four years. The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics. Ed:
”
”
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)
“
It fucking matters. What I do, our kind, signal technicians—it descends straight from you guys.”
“Our kind?” She tried to say it without sharing the classified parts. “The kind with blasted headphones and little cold rooms?”
“Yeah, them. You. Want to know the first thing I did, coming to England? I went to Bletchley Park. Because it’s Mecca to people like us. BP and all the outstations like the one you’re at. The Greatest Generation, all these girls like you sitting in little cold rooms with your headphones on. I saw that display, the Bakelite headphones and wireless receivers and what you managed to do with them, and I felt like I was in goddamn church.
”
”
Kate Quinn (Signal Moon)
“
I could come down for a couple of days, Daniel,but I'd like to bring someone."
"Someone?" Daniel's senses sharpened. He leaned forward with the cigar smoldering in his hand. "Who might this someone be?"
Recognizing the tone, Grant crunched o a corn chip. "An artist I know who's doing some painting in New England, in Winty Point at the moment. I think she'd be interested in your house."
She, Daniel thought with an irrepressible grin.Just because he'd managed to comfortably establish his children didn't mean he had to give up the satisfying hobby of matchmaking. Young people needed to be guided in such matters-or shoved along.And Grant-though he was a Campbell-was by way of being family...
"An artist...aye,that's interesting. Always room for one more,son. Bring her along. An artist," he repeated, tapping out his cigar. "Young and pretty, too, I'm sure."
"She's nearly seventy," Grant countered easily,crossing his ankles as he leaned against the wall. "A little dumpy, has a face like a frog.Her paintings are timeless, tremendous emotional content and physicality.I'm crazy about her." He paused, imagining Daniel's wide face turning a deep puce. "Genuine emotion transcends age and physical beauty, don't you agree?"
Daniel choked, then found his voice. The boy needed help,a great deal of help. "You come early Friday,son. We'll need some time to talk." He stared hard the bookshelf across the room. "Seventy, you say?"
"Close.But then true sensuality is ageless. Why just last night she and I-"
"No,don't tell me," Daniel interrupted hastily. "We'll have a long talk when you get here. A long talk," he added after a deep breath. "Has Shelby-No, never mind," he decided. "Friday," Daniel said in a firmer tone. "We'll see about all this on Friday."
"We'll be there." Grant hung up, then leaning against the doorjamb, laughed until he hurt. That should keep the old boy on his toes until Friday, Grant thought. Still grinning, he headed for the stairs. He'd work until dark-until Gennie.
”
”
Nora Roberts (The MacGregors: Alan & Grant (The MacGregors, #3-4))
“
Those who nod sagely and quote the tragedy of the commons in relation to environmental problems from pollution of the atmosphere to poaching of national parks tend to forget that Garrett Hardin revised his conclusions many times over thirty years. He recognized, most importantly, that anarchy did not prevail on the common pastures of midieval England in the way he had described [in his 1968 essay in 'Science']. The commoners--usually a limited number of people with defined rights in law--organized themselves to ensure it did not. The pastures were protected from ruin by the tradition of 'stinting,' which limited each herdsman to a fixed number of animals. 'A managed commons, though it may have other defects, is not automatically subject to the tragic fate of the unmanaged commons,' wrote Hardin, though he was still clearly unhappy with commoning arrangements. As with all forms of socialism, of which he regarded commoning as an early kind, Hardin said the flaw in the system lay in the quality of the management. The problem was alays how to prevent the managers from furthering their own interests. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians?
Hardin observed, crucially, that a successful managed common depended on limiting the numbers of commoners, limiting access, and having penalties that deterred.
[...]
None of Hardin's requirements for a successfully managed common is fulfilled by high-seas fishery regimes
”
”
Charles Clover (The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat)
“
This is where the music starts to slow. Because, let’s face it, the fact remains that in two decades since his arrival Wenger has had a greater, more visible – albeit rather tenuous – influence on Germany’s world champions than he has on the current England team. Despite being the only long-serving Premier League-era manager with any real sway or heft in the wider world – coach of five of France’s world champions in 1998 – he will leave no real mark on English football development or theory. Rather than cherished, brain selectively picked, Wenger is instead quietly mocked these days, cast as a cobwebbed crank, some doomed, sad stone knight still tending the hearth, a little creaky and mad, friends only with the flies and the beetles and the spiders.
”
”
Barney Ronay
“
HOPKINS’S VISIT TO ENGLAND was supposed to last two weeks; it expanded to over four, most of which he spent with Churchill against a backdrop of mounting suspense with regard to the Lend-Lease Bill, whose passage by Congress was anything but certain. In that time, Hopkins managed to endear himself to nearly everyone he met, including the valets at Claridge’s, who took an extra effort to make him look presentable. “Oh yes,” Hopkins told one valet. “I’ve got to remember I’m in London now—I’ve got to look dignified.” From time to time, the valets would find secret documents tucked into his clothing or discover that he had left his wallet in a pants pocket. A hotel waiter said Hopkins was “very genial—considerate—if I may say so, lovable—quite different from other Ambassadors we’ve had here.
”
”
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
“
Well, what happened to your scruples in the woodcutter’s cottage? You knew I thought you’d already left when I went inside.”
“Why did you stay,” he countered smoothly, “when you realized I was still there?”
In confused distress Elizabeth raked her hair off her forehead. “I knew I shouldn’t do it,” she admitted. “I don’t know why I remained.”
“You stayed for the same reason I did,” he informed her bluntly. “We wanted each other.”
“I was wrong,” she protested a little wildly. “Dangerous and-foolish!”
“Foolish or not,” he said grimly, “I wanted you. I want you now.” Elizabeth made the mistake of looking at him, and his amber eyes captured hers against her will, holding them imprisoned. The shawl she’d been clutching as if it was a lifeline to safety slid from her nerveless hand and dangled at her side, but Elizabeth didn’t notice.
“Neither of us has anything to gain by continuing this pretense that the weekend in England is over and forgotten,” he said bluntly. “Yesterday proved that it wasn’t over, if it proved nothing else, and it’s never been forgotten-I’ve remembered you all this time, and I know damn well you’ve remembered me.”
Elizabeth wanted to deny it; she sensed that if she did, he’d be so disgusted with her deceit that he’d turn on his heel and leave her. She lifted her chin, unable to tear her gaze from his, but she was too affected by the things he’d just admitted to her to lie to him. “All right,” she said shakily, “you win. I’ve never forgotten you or that weekend. How could I?” she added defensively.
He smiled at her angry retort, and his voice gentled to the timbre of rough velvet. “Come here, Elizabeth.”
“Why?” she whispered shakily.
“So that we can finish what we began that weekend.”
Elizabeth stared at him in paralyzed terror mixed with violet excitement and shook her head in a jerky refusal.
“I’ll not force you,” he said quietly, “nor will I force you to do anything you don’t want to do once you’re in my arms. Think carefully about that,” he warned, “because if you come to me now, you won’t be able to tell yourself in the morning that I made you do this against your will-or that you didn’t know what was going to happen. Yesterday neither of us knew what was going to happen. Now we do.”
Some small, insidious voice in her mind urged her to obey, reminded her that after the public punishment she’d taken for the last time they were together she was entitled to some stolen passionate kisses, if she wanted them. Another voice warned her not to break the rules again. “I-I can’t,” she said in a soft cry.
“There are four steps separating us and a year and a half of wanting drawing us together,” he said.
Elizabeth swallowed. “Couldn’t you meet me halfway?”
The sweetness of the question was almost Ian’s undoing, but he managed to shake his head. “Not this time. I want you, but I’ll not have you looking at me like a monster in the morning. If you want me, all you have to do is walk into my arms.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Elizabeth cried, looking a little wildly at the valley below, as if she were thinking of leaping off the path.
“Come here,” he invited huskily, “and I’ll show you.”
It was his tone, not his words, that conquered her. As if drawn by a will stronger than her own, Elizabeth walked forward and straight into his arms that closed around her with stunning force. “I didn’t think you were going to do it,” he whispered gruffly against her hair.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
Britain is a country that, since World War II, has been on a managed decline. The men live vicariously through their favorite soccer team, celebrating its success with “a few pints” and commiserating over its failings with “a few pints.” And the women—walking muffin tops. Yet they stride around with a terribly misplaced sense of entitlement. Even their TV shows are emblematic of their mediocre mentality. EastEnders and Coronation Street are all about fat, dumb, ugly, poor people. And there begins the vicious cycle of complacent underachievers. Maybe I’m biased because, despite being born in England, I grew up in the US. At least our equivalent TV shows are full of good-looking rich people doing big business deals and dating glamorous women. I wouldn’t mind my kids growing up wanting to be J. R. Ewing, but who the fuck wants to be a pub landlord in Essex?
”
”
John LeFevre (Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals)
“
The “United States” does not exist as a nation, because the ruling class of the U.S./Europe exploits the world without regard to borders and nationality. For instance, multinational or global corporations rule the world. They make their own laws by buying politicians– Democrats and Republicans, and white politicians in England and in the rest of Europe. We are ruled by a European power which disregards even the hypocritical U.S. Constitution. If it doesn’t like the laws of the U.S., as they are created, interpreted and enforced, the European power simply moves its base of management and labor to some other part of the world. Today the European power most often rules through neocolonial regimes in the so-called “Third World.” Through political leaders who are loyal only to the European power, not to their people and the interests of their nation, the European power sets up shop in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By further exploiting the people and stealing the resources of these nations on every continent outside Europe, the European power enhances its domination. Every institution and organization within the European power has the purpose of adding to its global domination: NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, the military, and the police. The European power lies to the people within each “nation” about national pride or patriotism. We foolishly stand with our hands over our hearts during the “National Anthem” at football games while the somber servicemen in their uniforms hold the red, white and blue flag, then a military jet flies over and we cheer. This show obscures the real purpose of the military, which is to increase European power through intimidation and the ongoing invasion of the globe. We are cheering for imperialist forces. We are standing on Native land celebrating the symbols of de-humanizing terrorism. Why would we do this unless we were being lied to? The European imperialist power lies to us about its imperialism. It’s safe to say, most “Americans” do not recognize that we are part of an empire. When we think of an empire we think of ancient Rome or the British Empire. Yet the ongoing attack against the Native peoples of “North America” is imperialism. When we made the “Louisiana Purchase” (somehow the French thought Native land was theirs to sell, and the U.S. thought it was ours to buy) this was imperialism. When we stole the land from Mexico, this was imperialism (the Mexican people having been previously invaded by the European imperialist power). Imperialism is everywhere. Only the lies of capitalism could so effectively lead us to believe that we are not part of an empire.
”
”
Samantha Foster (Center Africa / and Other Essays To Raise Reparations for African Liberation)
“
After four years, he stumbled from the steamy jungles exhausted, his clothes in tatters, trembling and half delirious from a recurrent fever, but with a rare collection of specimens. In the Brazilian port city of Pará, he secured passage home on a barque called the Helen. Midway across the Atlantic, however, the Helen caught fire and Wallace had to scramble into a lifeboat, leaving his precious cargo behind. He watched as the ship, consumed by flames, slid beneath the waves, taking his treasures with it. Undaunted (well, perhaps just a little daunted), Wallace allowed himself a spell of convalescence, then sailed to the other ends of the Earth, to the Malay Archipelago, where he roamed ceaselessly for eight years and collected a staggering 127,000 specimens, including 1,000 insects and 200 species of birds never before recorded, all of which he managed to get safely back to England.
”
”
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
“
John Prescott, during the last Labour government, had a mad plan, called the Pathfinder Initiative, to tear down 400,000 homes, mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses, in the north of England. Prescott claimed, on no evidence, that house prices there were too low because of an oversupply of stock. Mercifully, Prescott didn’t have the brains or focus to complete the plan, but he still managed to spend £2.2 billion of public money and bulldoze thirty thousand houses before he was stopped. So at precisely the time that one part of the government was talking about the need to build hundreds of thousands of new homes, another part of the same government was trying to tear down as many of them as it could. You simply can’t get madder than that. Nowhere were Prescott’s demented ambitions more keenly pursued than on Merseyside where 4,500 houses, nearly all comfortably lived in and doing no harm, were
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain)
“
To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised;
even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the
face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said
'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos
dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture
from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the
trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere,
flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the
Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were
bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of
all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small
number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class
clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not
understand, in some ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I
believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled,
been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were
simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.
”
”
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)
“
This is your opportunity! The Zed, shine your eyes! They call it a big-big name, evaluation consulting, but it is not difficult. You undervalue the properties and make sure it looks as if you are following due process. You acquire the property, sell off half to pay your purchase price, and you are in business! You’ll register your own company. Next thing, you’ll build a house in Lekki and buy some cars and ask our hometown to give you some titles and your friends to put congratulatory messages in the newspapers for you and before you know, any bank you walk into, they will want to package a loan immediately and give it to you, because they think you no longer need the money! And after you register your own company, you must find a white man. Find one of your white friends in England. Tell everybody he is your General Manager. You will see how doors will open for you because you have an oyinbo General Manager. Even Chief has some white men that he brings in for show when he needs them. That is how Nigeria works. I’m telling you.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
I still have no choice but to bring out Minerva instead.”
“But Minerva doesn’t care about men,” young Charlotte said helpfully. “She prefers dirt and rocks.”
“It’s called geology,” Minerva said. “It’s a science.”
“It’s certain spinsterhood, is what it is! Unnatural girl. Do sit straight in your chair, at least.” Mrs. Highwood sighed and fanned harder. To Susanna, she said, “I despair of her, truly. This is why Diana must get well, you see. Can you imagine Minerva in Society?”
Susanna bit back a smile, all too easily imagining the scene. It would probably resemble her own debut. Like Minerva, she had been absorbed in unladylike pursuits, and the object of her female relations’ oft-voiced despair. At balls, she’d been that freckled Amazon in the corner, who would have been all too happy to blend into the wallpaper, if only her hair color would have allowed it.
As for the gentlemen she’d met…not a one of them had managed to sweep her off her feet. To be fair, none of them had tried very hard.
She shrugged off the awkward memories. That time was behind her now.
Mrs. Highwood’s gaze fell on a book at the corner of the table. “I am gratified to see you keep Mrs. Worthington close at hand.”
“Oh yes,” Susanna replied, reaching for the blue, leatherbound tome. “You’ll find copies of Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom scattered everywhere throughout the village. We find it a very useful book.”
“Hear that, Minerva? You would do well to learn it by heart.” When Minerva rolled her eyes, Mrs. Highwood said, “Charlotte, open it now. Read aloud the beginning of Chapter Twelve.”
Charlotte reached for the book and opened it, then cleared her throat and read aloud in a dramatic voice. “’Chapter Twelve. The perils of excessive education. A young lady’s intellect should be in all ways like her undergarments. Present, pristine, and imperceptible to the casual observer.’”
Mrs. Highwood harrumphed. “Yes. Just so. Hear and believe it, Minerva. Hear and believe every word. As Miss Finch says, you will find that book very useful.”
Susanna took a leisurely sip of tea, swallowing with it a bitter lump of indignation. She wasn’t an angry or resentful person, as a matter of course. But once provoked, her passions required formidable effort to conceal.
That book provoked her, no end.
Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom for Young Ladies was the bane of sensible girls the world over, crammed with insipid, damaging advice on every page. Susanna could have gleefully crushed its pages to powder with a mortar and pestle, labeled the vial with a skull and crossbones, and placed it on the highest shelf in her stillroom, right beside the dried foxglove leaves and deadly nightshade berries.
Instead, she’d made it her mission to remove as many copies as possible from circulation. A sort of quarantine. Former residents of the Queen’s Ruby sent the books from all corners of England. One couldn’t enter a room in Spindle Cove without finding a copy or three of Mrs. Worthington’s Wisdom. And just as Susanna had told Mrs. Highwood, they found the book very useful indeed. It was the perfect size for propping a window open. It also made an excellent doorstop or paperweight. Susanna used her personal copies for pressing herbs. Or occasionally, for target practice.
She motioned to Charlotte. “May I?” Taking the volume from the girl’s grip, she raised the book high. Then, with a brisk thwack, she used it to crush a bothersome gnat.
With a calm smile, she placed the book on a side table. “Very useful indeed.
”
”
Tessa Dare (A Night to Surrender (Spindle Cove, #1))
“
While the Rumanian Radio was serializing (without my permission) How to be an Alien as an anti-British tract, the Central Office of Information rang me up here in London and asked me to allow the book to be translated into Polish for the benefit of those many Polish refugees who were then settling in this country. ‘We want our friends to see us in this light,’ the man said on the telephone. This was hard to bear for my militant and defiant spirit. ‘But it’s not such a favourable light,’ I protested feebly. ‘It’s a very human light and that is the most favourable,’ retorted the official. I was crushed.
A few weeks later my drooping spirit was revived when I heard of a suburban bank manager whose wife had brought this book home to him remarking that she had found it fairly amusing. The gentleman in question sat down in front of his open fire, put his feet up and read the book right through with a continually darkening face. When he had finished, he stood up and said:
‘Downright impertinence.’
And threw the book into the fire.
He was a noble and patriotic spirit and he did me a great deal of good. I wished there had been more like him in England. But I could never find another.
”
”
George Mikes (How to Be a Brit)
“
I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions.
Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?
”
”
Noam Chomsky (Chomsky On Anarchism)
“
Yet Laudan’s mother had no choice about whether to be a good cook or not. It was simply what was expected of her, and of every other farmer’s wife in England at that time. She did not cook because she ‘loved’ cooking but because this was the role that life had allotted her.
There was nothing unusual in the way that Laudan’s mother cooked. If anything, her life in the kitchen was easy by the standards of the day. At least a farmer’s wife had access to plentiful meat and vegetables, whereas city cooks in early twentieth-century Britain were expected to produce the same quantity of meals but with meagre ingredients and limited equipment, often in single-room dwellings where there was no kitchen and no escape from cooking. We idealise the homespun meals of the past, imagining rosy-cheeked women laying down picturesque bottles of peaches and plums. But much of the art of ‘cooking’ in pre-modern times was a harried mother slinging what she could in a pot and engaging in a daily smoke-filled battle to keep a fire alive and under control, on top of all the other chores she had to manage.
Before we offer too many lamentations for the cookery of the past, we should remember how hard it was – and still is, for millions of people – to cook when you have no choice in the matter.
”
”
Bee Wilson (The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change)
“
Mr. Quincy told me that he will be working for you in London. I am glad, for both your sakes, that you’ve given him such an opportunity. He will be an excellent valet.”
“For what I’m paying him,” Winterborne said, “he’d better be the best in England.”
Helen was briefly nonplussed. “I have no doubt he will be,” she ventured.
Meticulously Winterborne neatened the stack of paper. “He wants to start by disposing of my shirts.”
“Your shirts,” Helen repeated, perplexed.
“One of my managers brought some of my clothes from London. Quincy could tell that the shirts were ready-made.” He glanced at her warily, assessing her reaction. “To be accurate,” he continued, “they’re sold half finished, so they can be tailored to the customer’s preference. The quality of the fabric is as high as any bespoke shirt, but Quincy still turns up his nose.”
Helen considered her reply carefully. “A man of Quincy’s profession has an exacting eye when it comes to details.” She probably should have left it at that. The discussion of a man’s clothing was entirely improper, but she felt that she should help him to understand Quincy’s concerns. “It’s more than just the fabric. The stitching is different in a bespoke shirt: The seams are perfectly straight and flat-felled, and the buttonholes are often hand-worked with a keyhole shape at one side to reduce the stress of the button’s shank.” She paused with a smile. “I would elaborate about plackets and cuffs, but I fear you would fall asleep in the chair.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
this I say,—we must never forget that all the education a man's head can receive, will not save his soul from hell, unless he knows the truths of the Bible. A man may have prodigious learning, and yet never be saved. He may be master of half the languages spoken round the globe. He may be acquainted with the highest and deepest things in heaven and earth. He may have read books till he is like a walking cyclopædia. He may be familiar with the stars of heaven,—the birds of the air,—the beasts of the earth, and the fishes of the sea. He may be able, like Solomon, to "speak of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows on the wall, of beasts also, and fowls, and creeping things, and fishes." (1 King iv. 33.) He may be able to discourse of all the secrets of fire, air, earth, and water. And yet, if he dies ignorant of Bible truths, he dies a miserable man! Chemistry never silenced a guilty conscience. Mathematics never healed a broken heart. All the sciences in the world never smoothed down a dying pillow. No earthly philosophy ever supplied hope in death. No natural theology ever gave peace in the prospect of meeting a holy God. All these things are of the earth, earthy, and can never raise a man above the earth's level. They may enable a man to strut and fret his little season here below with a more dignified gait than his fellow-mortals, but they can never give him wings, and enable him to soar towards heaven. He that has the largest share of them, will find at length that without Bible knowledge he has got no lasting possession. Death will make an end of all his attainments, and after death they will do him no good at all. A man may be a very ignorant man, and yet be saved. He may be unable to read a word, or write a letter. He may know nothing of geography beyond the bounds of his own parish, and be utterly unable to say which is nearest to England, Paris or New York. He may know nothing of arithmetic, and not see any difference between a million and a thousand. He may know nothing of history, not even of his own land, and be quite ignorant whether his country owes most to Semiramis, Boadicea, or Queen Elizabeth. He may know nothing of the affairs of his own times, and be incapable of telling you whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or the Commander-in-Chief, or the Archbishop of Canterbury is managing the national finances. He may know nothing of science, and its discoveries,—and whether Julius Cæsar won his victories with gunpowder, or the apostles had a printing press, or the sun goes round the earth, may be matters about which he has not an idea. And yet if that very man has heard Bible truth with his ears, and believed it with his heart, he knows enough to save his soul. He will be found at last with Lazarus in Abraham's bosom, while his scientific fellow-creature, who has died unconverted, is lost for ever. There is much talk in these days about science and "useful knowledge." But after all a knowledge of the Bible is the one knowledge that is needful and eternally useful. A man may get to heaven without money, learning, health, or friends,—but without Bible knowledge he will never get there at all. A man may have the mightiest of minds, and a memory stored with all that mighty mind can grasp,—and yet, if he does not know the things of the Bible, he will make shipwreck of his soul for ever. Woe! woe! woe to the man who dies in ignorance of the Bible! This is the Book about which I am addressing the readers of these pages to-day. It is no light matter what you do with such a book. It concerns the life of your soul. I summon you,—I charge you to give an honest answer to my question. What are you doing with the Bible? Do you read it? HOW READEST THOU?
”
”
J.C. Ryle (Practical Religion Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians)
“
The man who invented bomb warfare against an innocent civilian population declared that this bomb warfare against Germany and so on will shortly be greatly stepped up. I would like to add one thing to this: in May 1940, Mr. Churchill sent the first bombers against the German civilian population. At the time, I kept warning him, for almost four months-in vain. Then, we struck. And we struck so thoroughly that he began to cry and declared that this was barbaric and terrible, and that England would seek revenge. The man on whose conscience all this weighs-not counting the great warmonger Roosevelt-and who is to blame for everything, this man then dared to claim that he was innocent.
Today, he continues to wage this war.
I would like to say here: the hour will also come this time when we have to answer! May the two great criminals of this war and their Jewish masterminds not start whining and weeping if the end is more terrible for England than the beginning! At the Reichstag session of September 1, 1939, I said two things: First, since this war was forced on us, neither the power of arms nor time will defeat us. Second, should Jewry instigate an international world war in order to exterminate the Aryan people of Europe, then not the Aryan people will be exterminated, but the Jews. The wire pullers of this insane man in the White House have managed to pull one nation after another into this war.
Correspondingly, however, a wave of anti-Semitism swept over one nation after another. And it will continue to do so, taking hold of one state after another. Every state that enters this war will one day emerge from it as an anti- Semitic state. The Jews once laughed about my prophecies in Germany. I do not know whether they are still laughing today or whether they no longer feel like laughing. Today, too, I can assure you of one thing: they will soon not feel like laughing anymore anywhere. My prophecies will prove correct here, too.
”
”
Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
“
In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons."
Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York.
Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.
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Zahid Sardar (In & Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delights)
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What are we taking away from England, what from France, what from America? Nothing at all! How many times did I offer them peace?! What else should I be offering them? They are men who say, like Churchill, “I want war.” With them, there is a certain clique. And behind these corrupt, drunk creatures, there are the paying forces of international Jewry. On the other side, there is an old Freemason who believes that through a war he can win time for stabilizing his bankrupt economy again. And so, both states again confront the same enemies for the very same reasons. And they are forced to fight together, to lead the same struggle, which ties them in life and in death.
And there is a fourth element: in both cases, there are two men who come from the people, who have kindled the revolutions and have uplifted their states. In the few free hours I have had these last weeks, I read a lot about the Fascist revolution in Italy. It seemed to me as though I had before me the history of my own party: everything so similar, so much the same. The same struggle, the same enemies, the same opponents, the same arguments-it really is a miracle. And now, we fight in the same theaters of war: Germans in Africa, Italians in the east. We fight together, and nobody should deceive himself: This struggle will be seen through to our joint victory! And finally, a third state joined us. For many years, I have wanted to have good relations with this state-Japan-as you know from Mein Kampf.
And so, the three great have-nots are now united. We will see who will be stronger in this struggle: those who have nothing to lose and everything to win, or those who have everything to lose and who cannot win anything. What does England want to win? What does America want to win? They have so much that they do not know what to do with all they own. They need to feed only a few people per square kilometer. They do not have all those worries that trouble us. For us, a single bad harvest is a national disaster. They have the whole world at their disposal. For decades now, they have robbed us, exploited us, bled us white, and still they have not eliminated their own economic misery. They have more raw materials than they could possibly need, and still they have not managed to find a reasonable solution to their problems. We will see on whom Providence will bestow the victor’s laurels in this struggle: on the man who has everything and wants to take even the last bit from the man who has almost nothing, or on the man, who defends the last bit he owns. And when a British archbishop prays to the Lord that He might strike Germany and Europe with Bolshevism as a punishment-then I can only say, it will not come to Germany. But whether or not He will strike England, that is another question.
Speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1942
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Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
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Miss Prudence Mercer
Stony Cross
Hampshire, England
7 November 1854
Dear Prudence,
Regardless of the reports that describe the British soldier as unflinching, I assure you that when riflemen are under fire, we most certainly duck, bob, and run for cover. Per your advice, I have added a sidestep and a dodge to my repertoire, with excellent results. To my mind, the old fable has been disproved: there are times in life when one definitely wants to be the hare, not the tortoise.
We fought at the southern port of Balaklava on the twenty-fourth of October. Light Brigade was ordered to charge directly into a battery of Russian guns for no comprehensible reason. Five cavalry regiments were mowed down without support. Two hundred men and nearly four hundred horses lost in twenty minutes. More fighting on the fifth of November, at Inkerman.
We went to rescue soldiers stranded on the field before the Russians could reach them. Albert went out with me under a storm of shot and shell, and helped to identify the wounded so we could carry them out of range of the guns. My closest friend in the regiment was killed.
Please thank your friend Prudence for her advice for Albert. His biting is less frequent, and he never goes for me, although he’s taken a few nips at visitors to the tent.
May and October, the best-smelling months? I’ll make a case for December: evergreen, frost, wood smoke, cinnamon. As for your favorite song…were you aware that “Over the Hills and Far Away” is the official music of the Rifle Brigade?
It seems nearly everyone here has fallen prey to some kind of illness except for me. I’ve had no symptoms of cholera nor any of the other diseases that have swept through both divisions. I feel I should at least feign some kind of digestive problem for the sake of decency.
Regarding the donkey feud: while I have sympathy for Caird and his mare of easy virtue, I feel compelled to point out that the birth of a mule is not at all a bad outcome. Mules are more surefooted than horses, generally healthier, and best of all, they have very expressive ears. And they’re not unduly stubborn, as long they’re managed well. If you wonder at my apparent fondness for mules, I should probably explain that as a boy, I had a pet mule named Hector, after the mule mentioned in the Iliad.
I wouldn’t presume to ask you to wait for me, Pru, but I will ask that you write to me again. I’ve read your last letter more times than I can count. Somehow you’re more real to me now, two thousand miles away, than you ever were before.
Ever yours,
Christopher
P.S. Sketch of Albert included
As Beatrix read, she was alternately concerned, moved, and charmed out of her stockings. “Let me reply to him and sign your name,” she begged. “One more letter. Please, Pru. I’ll show it to you before I send it.”
Prudence burst out laughing. “Honestly, this is the silliest things I’ve ever…Oh, very well, write to him again if it amuses you.
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Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
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Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare.
Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest.
Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine.
In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.
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Hank Bracker
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you are brought face to face with the great question about the soccer coach: Does he really matter? It turns out that coaches or managers (call them what you like) simply don’t make that much difference.
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Simon Kuper (Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport)
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But there isn’t much else most club managers can do to push their teams up the table. After all, players matter much more. As Johan Cruijff said when he was coaching Barcelona, “If your players are better than your opponents, 90 percent of the time you will win.” There cannot be many businesses where a manager would make such an extravagant claim. The chairman of General Motors does not say that the art of good management is simply hiring the best designers or the best production managers.
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Simon Kuper (Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport)
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Sardar was far better academically, and far wiser than Nehru. Like Nehru, Sardar Patel too had studied in England. But, while Nehru’s father financed all his education, Sardar financed his own education in England, through his own earnings! While Nehru could manage to scrape through in only a poor lower second-division in England, Sardar Patel topped in the first division! Professionally too, Sardar was a successful lawyer, while Nehru was a failure. Sardar had a roaring practice, and was the highest paid lawyer in Ahmedabad, before he left it all on a call by Gandhi; while Nehru was dependent upon his father for his own upkeep, and that of his family.
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Rajnikant Puranik (Nehru's 97 Major Blunders)
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Mr. Gresham had been Prime Minister of England, as representative of the Liberal party in politics. There had come to be a split among those who should have been his followers on the terribly vexed question of the Ballot. Then Mr. Daubeny for twelve months had sat upon the throne distributing the good things of the Crown amidst Conservative birdlings, with beaks wide open and craving maws, who certainly for some years previous had not received their share of State honours or State emoluments. And Mr. Daubeny was still so sitting, to the infinite dismay of the Liberals, every man of whom felt that his party was entitled by numerical strength to keep the management of the Government within its own hands.
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Anthony Trollope (Complete Works of Anthony Trollope)
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home. The entire Luftwaffe seemed to be waiting for him. Bombing and strafing, the enemy planes made pass after pass. Fortunately Sundowner could turn on a sixpence, and Lightoller had learned a few tricks from an expert. His youngest son, killed in the first days of the war, had been a bomber pilot and often talked about evasion tactics. The father now put his lost son’s theories to work. The secret was to wait until the last instant, when the enemy plane was already committed, then hard rudder before the pilot could readjust. Squirming and dodging his way across the Channel, Lightoller managed to get Sundowner back to England without a scratch. Gliding into Ramsgate
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Walter Lord (The Miracle of Dunkirk (Wordsworth Collection))
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A little farther on she managed to find some zucchini she was happy with, and back in the kitchen he watched as she sorted them into two piles, one of wrist-thick vegetables with veined orange flowers at the end, the other of star-shaped open flowers.
"These are pretty," he remarked, picking up one of the blooms.
"They taste good too."
"You eat the flowers?" he said, surprised.
"Of course. We have them stuffed with mozzarella, then dipped in a little batter and fried. But only the male flowers. The female ones are too soft."
"I hadn't realized," he said, taking one and tucking it behind her ear, "that flowers could be male and female. Let alone edible."
"Everything is male and female. And everything is edible. You just need to remember to cook them differently."
"In England we say, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
"How very stupid. A goose has a light taste, so you would cook it in a gentle white wine sauce, perhaps with a little tarragon or oregano. But a gander has a strong, gamey flavor. It needs rich tastes: red wine, perhaps, or mushrooms. It's the same with a gallina, a hen, and a pollastrello, a cock." She glanced sideways at him. "If the English try to cook a pollastrello and a gallinathe same way, it explains a lot."
"Such as?" he asked, curious. But she was busy with her cooking, and only rolled her eyes at him as if the answer were too obvious to mention.
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Anthony Capella (The Wedding Officer)
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A little farther on she managed to find some zucchini she was happy with, and back in the kitchen he watched as she sorted them into two piles, one of wrist-thick vegetables with veined orange flowers at the end, the other of star-shaped open flowers.
"These are pretty," he remarked, picking up one of the blooms.
"They taste good too."
"You eat the flowers?" he said, surprised.
"Of course. We have them stuffed with mozzarella, then dipped in a little batter and fried. But only the male flowers. The female ones are too soft."
"I hadn't realized," he said, taking one and tucking it behind her ear, "that flowers could be male and female. Let alone edible."
"Everything is male and female. And everything is edible. You just need to remember to cook them differently."
"In England we say, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander."
"How very stupid. A goose has a light taste, so you would cook it in a gentle white wine sauce, perhaps with a little tarragon or oregano. But a gander has a strong, gamey flavor. It needs rich tastes: red wine, perhaps, or mushrooms. It's the same with a gallina, a hen, and a pollastrello, a cock." She glanced sideways at him. "If the English try to cook a pollastrello and a gallina the same way, it explains a lot."
"Such as?" he asked, curious. But she was busy with her cooking, and only rolled her eyes at him as if the answer were too obvious to mention.
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Anthony Capella (The Wedding Officer)
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In his four months in England, wrote Corwin, “I did not once interview a high government official. The main objective of the series was to establish the character of the British people and not disseminate the handouts of the Ministry of Information. The people were soldiers, sailors, workers, miners, the theater manager, the elevator man, Police Officer Gilbert, the Everingtons, the Westerbys, Betty Hardy the actress, Henry Blogg the lifesaver, Mary Seaton the newspaperwoman, the RAF officer who handed me a dish in the mess and explained, ‘This sausage is made of two ingredients—paper and sawdust’; the navigator, just returned from Wilhelmshaven, who said wistfully, ‘Somehow we’re always first in over the target’; the woman in Swansea who went to the Guildhall one morning following a severe blitz and turned in two suits of clothes, both nearly new, saying she had bought them for her two boys, killed in the raid.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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All Hale Kate: Her story is as close to a real-life fairy tale as it gets. Born Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, the quiet, sporty girl next door from the small town of Bucklebury - not quite Cinderella, but certainly a "commoner" by blue bloods' standards - managed to enchant the most eligible bachelor in the world, Prince William, while they were university students 15 years ago. It wasn't long before everyone else fell in love with her, too. We ached for her as she waited patiently for a proposal through 10 years of friendship and romance (and one devastating breakup!), cheered along with about 300 million other TV viewers when she finally became a princess bride in 2011, and watched in awe as she proceeded to graciously but firmly drag the stuffy royal family into the 21st century. And though she never met her mother-in-law, the late, beloved, Princess Diana, Kate is now filling the huge void left not just in her husband's life but in the world's heart when the People's Princess died. The Duchess of Cambridge shares Di's knack for charming world leaders and the general public alike, and the same fierce devotion to her family above all else. She's a busy, modern mom who wears affordable clothes, does her own shopping and cooking, struggles with feelings of insecurity and totes her kids along to work (even if the job happens to involve globe-trotting official state visits) - all while wearing her signature L.K. Bennett 4 inch heels. And one day in the not-too-distance future, this woman who grew up in a modest brick home in the countryside - and seems so very much like on of us- will take on another impossibly huge role: queen of England.
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Kate Middleton Collector's Edition Magazine
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Sardar was far better academically, and much more intelligent than Nehru. Like Nehru, Sardar Patel too had studied in England. But, while Nehru’s father financed all his education, Sardar financed his own education in England, through his own earnings! While Nehru could manage to scrape through in only a poor lower second-division in England, Sardar Patel topped in the first division!
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Rajnikant Puranik (Nehru's 97 Major Blunders)
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Josie said. “We almost gave up several times,” Dora admitted, shaking her head. “But maybe the quilt did keep us from going home earlier than we had planned.” “I like the name Rolling Stones,” Josie commented. “Hey, that’s kind of like us. We didn’t use wagons, but we managed to tour part of the country.” “You’re right. I believe we should just keep the quilt.” “Won’t it remind us of all the anxious moments?” “Maybe, but we showed courage and persevered,” Dora said, soundly. “Hey, where’s the bonus they promised us?” “Well, I don’t know.” Dora searched the box and held up a blue envelope. “Let’s see.” Josie whipped it out of her hand. She broke the seal and took out two airplane tickets. “Airplane tickets?” Dora asked in disbelief. “What do we do with tickets?” “Here’s a note between the tickets.” Josie opened it. “It says the tickets are for a quilt show in Philadelphia. Milton wants us to attend. He says he will meet us there and answer more questions for us.” “But we’re afraid to fly,” Dora protested. “Could we send the tickets back?” Josie suggested. “I don’t think so. Milton will be out his money.” “When is it?” Dora took the tickets and examined them. “In September. Only a month away.” Josie tapped her chin in thought. “If we decided to do more touring, we could extend our trip from there to the New England States.” “We could see the autumn leaves,” Dora said, excitement rising in her voice. “Anthony wanted us to visit him in Iowa,” Josie reminded Dora. “How are we going to work all this in?” “I have no idea. Why does traveling have to be so complicated and so full of surprises?” ______ MDora looped a bright red scarf around her neck while glancing out her bedroom window. The wind swirled bits of trash down the sidewalk of their Hedge City, Nebraska, home. She sighed, wishing she could stay at home today and read. Buzzie looked up at her and meowed, expressing the same sentiments. She reached down and patted her softly. But she didn’t have that luxury today. She had agreed to substitute teach for the current English teacher who would be out for at least a week. Josie called from the kitchen. “Want more coffee?” “Yes, please. Fill my mug. I’ll drink it on my way to school.” She reached into the closet and pulled out a beige sweater. A glance in the mirror confirmed the bright red scarf did wonders for the nondescript sweater’s color. Josie joined her at the door dressed in russet slacks and matching jacket and handed Dora her mug. “A little blustery today.” “For sure.” Dora eyed Josie, wishing she had the sense of style Josie displayed. The sisters would walk together and then would split to their separate ways, Josie to fill in at the
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Jan Cerney Book 1 Winslow Quilting Mysteries (Heist Along the Rails: Book 1 Winslow Quilting Mysteries (The Winslow Quilting Mysteries))
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We’ve discussed two parallel adaptations to manage the sun’s dueling effects on body chemistry—the evolution of dark skin to protect our stores of folate and the evolution of a genetic trigger for increased cholesterol to maximize production of vitamin D. Both of those adaptations are common in people of African descent and are effective—in the bright, strong sun of equatorial Africa. But what happens when people with those adaptations move to New England, where the sun is much less plentiful and far less strong? Without enough sunlight to penetrate their dark skin and convert the additional cholesterol, they’re doubly vulnerable—not enough vitamin D and too much cholesterol. Sure enough, rickets—the disease caused by a vitamin D deficiency that causes poor bone growth in children—was very common in African American populations until we started routinely fortifying milk with vitamin D in the last century. And there appear to be connections among sunlight, vitamin D, and prostate cancer in African Americans as well. There is growing evidence that vitamin D inhibits the growth of cancerous cells in the prostate and in other areas, including the colon, too. Epidemiologists, who specialize in unlocking the mystery of where, why, and in whom disease occurs, have found that the risk of prostate cancer for black men in America climbs from south to north. When it comes to prostate cancer in black men, the risk is considerably lower in sunny Florida. But as you move north, the rate of prostate cancer in black men climbs until it peaks in the often cloud-covered heights of the Northeast.
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Sharon Moalem (Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease)
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PAUL: It was great at the beginning. I could speak the language almost fluently after a month and the people were fantastic. They’d come out and help us. Teach us songs. Man, we thought it was all going so well. But we got all the outhouses dug in six months and we had to stay there two years, that was the deal. And that’s when we began to realize that none of the Nglele were using these outhouses. We’d ask them why and they’d just shrug. So we started watching them very carefully and what we found out was the Nglele use their feces for fertilizer. It’s like gold to them. They thought we were all fucking crazy expecting them to waste their precious turds in our spiffy new outhouses. Turns out they’d been helping us because they misunderstood why we were there. They thought it was some kind of punishment and we’d be allowed to go home after we finished digging the latrines, that’s why they were helping us and then when we stayed on they figured we must be permanent outcasts or something and they just stopped talking to us altogether. Anyway, me and Jeff, the guy I told you about, we figured maybe we could salvage something from the fuckup so we got a doctor to make a list of all the medicines we’d need to start a kind of skeleton health program in Ngleleland and we ordered the medicine, pooled both our salaries for the two years to pay for it. Paid for it. Waited. Never came. So we went to the capital to trace it and found out this very funny thing. The Minister of Health had confiscated it at the dock, same man who got our team assigned to the Nglele Tribal Territories in the first place. We were furious, man, we stormed into his office and started yelling at him. Turned out to be a real nice guy. Educated in England, British accent and everything. Had this office lined with sets of Dickens and Thackeray all in leather bindings. Unbelievable. Anyway, he said he couldn’t help us about the medicine, he’d been acting on orders from higher up, which we knew was bullshit, then he said he really admired our enthusiasm and our desire to help his people but he wanted to know just out of curiosity, if we’d managed to start the medical program and save a thousand lives, let’s say, he wanted to know if we were prepared to feed and clothe those thousand people for the next ten years, twenty years, however long they lived. He made us feel so goddamned naive, so totally helpless and unprepared, powerless. We went out of there, got drunk, paid the first women we could find and spent the rest of the week fucking our brains out. And then for the next year and two months we just sat around in Ngleleland stoned out of our minds counting off the days we had left before we could go home. Anyway, since you asked, that’s what the Peace Corps was like.
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Michael Weller (Five Plays)
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Even when he went to the House of Commons as a Liberal he remained the city’s undisputed ruler. In Parliament he surprised his colleagues by not being a wild demagogue but a highly polished debater making concise and pointed speeches. “The performance,” according to the British journalist J. A. Spender, “was, if anything, too perfect. ‘It is all very nice, very nice, Mr. Chamberlain,’ said an old member whose advice he sought, ‘but the House would take it as such a great compliment, if now and again you could manage to break down.’ ”49 CHAMBERLAIN REMAINED A RADICAL, advocating social reforms, and attacked such privileged institutions as landlords and the established Church of England. Yet he also developed a passionate attachment to the British Empire which he believed was a force for good in the world. That conviction led him to break with the Liberals in 1886 when they proposed Home Rule for Ireland; Chamberlain and his supporters argued that it would undermine the unity of the empire. In time, the Liberal Unionists, as they were known, moved towards the Conservative Party.50 Chamberlain never defended himself to his former colleagues. He simply moved on. He had, said Spender, “a deadly concentration” on what he was doing and that was mainly politics: “Everything
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Margaret MacMillan (The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914)
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And added, that as nervous disorders were more frequent in England, than in any country in the world, he was willing to hope, that the English physicians were more skilful than those of any other country in the management of persons afflicted with such maladies:
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Samuel Richardson (Complete Works of Samuel Richardson)
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You led Shenzhen Football / You saved Shenzhen Football. "
Chinese pro football soccer league (second division) Shenzhen FC recently announced a number of poems like this one. It seems like a tribute to Sven Jerran Eriksson (69, photo), a world-renowned manager who has been assigned to the club this season. But looking back, the story was different. The club said, 'We call the legend again. Let's go on a new trip together. "
믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다.
24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다
믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다.
원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다
깔끔한거래,안전거래,총알배송,고객님정보보호,100%정품,편한상담,신용신뢰의 거래,후불거래등 고객님들의 편의를 기본으로 운영하고있는 온라인 판매업체입니다
The poem was a clearing for Eriksson. He was tortured in the club with one side on the 14th. The poem 'You' was not his, but the former director of Wang Baoshan. The Shenzhen team first announced the city verses through its homepage, and then the local media asked whether it was a change of director.
◀경영항목▶텔레【KC98K】카톡【ACD5】라인【SPR331】
엑스터시,신의눈물,lsd,아이스,캔디,대마초,마리화나,프로포폴,에토미데이트,해피벌륜 등많은제품판매하고있습니다
Sweden coach Eriksson is one of the best players in the World Cup finals. In 2001, he became the first foreign coach in England's history. He led Beckham, Owen and others to advance to the quarter-finals in the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup and the 2006 Germany World Cup. At the 2010 South African tournament he was promoted to coach Ivory Coast. Benfica, AS Roma and Manchester City also led the pros.
It was in June 2013 that Eriksson, who became a world class soccer player, started his career in Chinese football. He was appointed to the first division of Guangzhou Puri in China with an annual salary of about 3.5 billion won. It was a bad condition for him to spend the last years of his life as a leader. After failing to sign a new contract, he became a manager of the Shanghai Sanggang, subject to an annual salary of 6 billion won by the end of 2014. After two years of hardship, he moved to China 2nd Division League Shenzhen FC. But here, the duration of the bust was shorter. Eriksson's lead has been in fourth place in the league since he lost five consecutive wins in the league in eight consecutive wins (five and three losses). The club, aiming at promoting the first division, has been pushing out Eriksson in six months because of the atmosphere.
Early exits such as Eriksson can be found easily in Chinese football world that pours a lot of money into directing shopping. Only Lee Jang Soo (Changchun), Choi Yong Soo (Jangsu) and Hong Myung Bo (Hangzhou) have left the team during the season due to poor performance.
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Soccer manager, Eriksson, I do not like last year.
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In this routine, the introverted Jefferson manages his emotions.
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Bill O'Reilly (Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independnce)
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Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies ‘languishing in listlessness’ as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale. 4
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Amanda Vickery (The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England)
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But rather, if there be any too desirous of gain, to intreat them to moderate their affections; and [to] consider that no man expecteth fruit before the tree be grown. Advising all men that, as they tender their own welfare, so to make choice of such to manage and govern their affairs as are approved, not to be seekers of themselves, but [of] the common good of all for whom they are employed. And beseeching such as have the care of transporting men for the supply and furnishing of Plantations, to be truly careful in sending such as may further, and not hinder, so good an action.
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Edward Winslow (Good Newes from New England)
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For Russia to adapt to a liberal regime, she would have to weaken considerably—her vigor would have to decline; better still: she would have to lose her specific character and denationalize in depth. How would she manage this, with her unbroached internal resources and her thousand years of autocracy? Even if she were to achieve such a thing in one bound, she would instantly disintegrate. Even more than a nation, an empire, if it is to survive and to flourish, requires a certain dose of terror. France herself could invest in democracy only when her springs were beginning to loosen, only when, no longer seeking hegemony, she was preparing to become prudent and respectable. Her First Empire was her final folly. Thereupon, accessible to liberty, she would become painfully accustomed to it, through a number of convulsions, unlike England, which—a bewildering example—had free relations of long standing, without shocks or dangers, thanks to the conformism and the enlightened stupidity of her citizens (the country has not produced, to my knowledge, a single anarchist).
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Emil M. Cioran (History and Utopia)
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Henry VII’s regime (1485–1500):
From these south-western shire surveys it appears that there was not one magnate who provided a ‘political centre’ for the region during Henry’s reign: no leading peer seems to have had the requisite combination of landholding, office-holding, and associations spread throughout all the counties. Rather, it seems that two south-western meso-regional magnates might be discerned: Lords Daubeney and Willoughby (p. 341).
The alliances of the two most influential Cornish families during this period, the Edgcumbes and the Arundells, with Lord Willoughby [de Broke] emphasises the peer’s importance in the governance of Devon and Cornwall… In summary, it seems that, as in Devon, the chief magnate in Cornwall was Lord Willoughby. He could not rely on the support only of those associated directly with him, but on the aid of other local figures through his secondary patrons, [John, Lord] Dinham, [Edward Courtenay, Earl of] Devon, [John] Arundell, and the Edgcumbes (p. 336).
The intermediate focus of royal authority between county and centre in Henry VI’s later years and under Edward IV had been the regional governor. The conciliar governance of Richard III’s Council of the North was continued by the Tudors who reinstituted this council, and the prince’s council in Wales and the Marches, while also creating a regional council in the Midlands focussed on Henry’s mother. However, in the south-west no single magnate or council was given such regional power, which may have been because Henry’s chief magnates were his loyal household officers, his steward and chamberlain… Henry VII’s governance–as chiefly restorative rather than innovatory–might therefore be described as a renewed monarchy, which, it could be said, by revitalising political structures, finally managed to hoist the ensign of settlement above the battlefields of the Wars of the Roses (p. 344).
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Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth (Political Elites in South-West England, 1450–1500: Politics, Governance, and the Wars of the Roses)
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They measured, surveyed, and allocated whatever land had not been distributed. They built roads, bridges, fences, livestock pounds, and public landings. They exported barrel staves and imported “salt and Barbados goods on reasonable terms.” They authorized the building of a warehouse whose owner would “supply the town of Lyme with salt and certain woods upon reasonable terms,” and they prohibited the cutting of timber on common land and the “transport of the same out of the town” because “all sorts of timber grow scarce among us.” They also managed the operation of the gristmill to keep it “in repair continually for to grind the town’s corn all winter and summer,” and they decided the length of the school year, authorizing two dame schools “for teaching young children and maids to read and whatever else they may be capable of learning, either knitting or sewing.” In 1685 they decided to erect “a pair of stocks & scaffold to answer the laws within a month at the meeting house.
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Carolyn Wakeman (Forgotten Voices: The Hidden History of a New England Meetinghouse (The Driftless Series))
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He argued the UK’s freight industry is ‘very, very good’ and the UK is fantastic at managing complex supply chains – confirmed during the Brexit period and coronavirus pandemic, when supply chains remained mostly intact and fears of mass shortages proved unfounded.
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Sebastian Payne (Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour's Lost England)
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Racetracks seem to reward innocence. If babies were permitted to wager, they'd ultimately win so much money that management everywhere would bar them. NO BABIES ALLOWED, says a big sign at Hialeah. At Belmont Park, it reads, BEAT IT, BABIES.
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Bill Barich (Traveling Light: A Year of Wandering, from California to England and Tuscany and Back Again)
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The elders, being met at Boston about this matter, sent some of their company to acquaint the old governor with their desire, and the reasons moving them, clearing themselves of all dislike of his government, and seriously professing their sincere affections and respect towards him, which he kindly and thankfully accepted, concurring with them in their motion, and expressing his unfeigned desire of more freedom, that he might a little intend his private occasions, wherein (they well knew) how much he had lately suffered (for his bailiff, whom he trusted with managing his farm, had engaged him £2500 without his privity) in his outward estate. This they had heard of, and were much affected therewith, and all the country in general, and took course, (the elders agreeing upon it at that meeting,) that supply should be sent in from the several towns, by a voluntary contribution, for freeing of those engagements; and the court (having no money to bestow, and being yet much indebted) gave his wife three thousand acres of land, and some of the towns sent in liberally, and some others promised, but could perform but little, and the most nothing at all. The whole came not to £500 whereof near half came from Boston, and one gentleman of Newbury, Mr. Richard Dummer, propounded for a supply by a more private way, and for example, himself disbursed £100.
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John Winthrop (Winthrop's Journal, History of New England, 1630-1649: Volume 2)
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So often we try to exclude sorrow, try not to show it, as though by doing so we dishonour ourselves, as though in showing weakness we are saying we have no strength. But strength is not the absence of weakness. It is just the opposite. Strength is feeling the weakness within and managing to carry on.
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G. Lawrence (Invincible (The Elizabeth of England Chronicles, #8))
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As Mrs. Crawley said to Mr. Birkett she was afraid they might all have been had up before Convocation for lése-episcopacy, if there was such a phrase, in which case her husband would probably be ungaitered and turned into a perpetual curate. To which Mrs. Morland, who had been getting her hair tidy again after her ecclesiastical excursion, said it must be exactly like being sent to the galleys for life to be a perpetual curate and she never could understand how the Dean’s grandfather, who was perpetual curate of Hogglestock, managed to escape and be Vicar of St. Ewold’s. But a judgment fell upon her for such ignorance, for the School Chaplain who had been rather afraid of joining in the foregoing conversation in case the Bishop came to hear of it, made up for his silence by giving Mrs. Morland a great deal of information about the various kinds of living in the Church of England, very little of which that worthy creature could understand, but somehow it all seeped through into the writing part of her mind and was used with great effect in her next but one book where Madame Koska was abducted by a Russian disguised as a commercial traveller for a French silk firm and rescued by a perpetual curate who married one of her beautiful but pure mannequins: and the Guardian and the Church Times applauded the deep moral lesson of Mrs. Morland’s new book and her profound knowledge of church matters, so rare among even the most intelligent of the laity in these troublous times.
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Angela Thirkell (Private Enterprise)
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The man had managed to find her a corsage in the middle of rural Warwickshire during a war.
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Julia Kelly (The Last Garden in England)
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By the early seventies I had become an Englishman - that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do. I was alienated by the manager’s ignorance, prejudice and fear, positive that my own choices would destroy any team in the world, and I had a deep antipathy towards players from Tottenham, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester United.
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Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch)
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The word the Anglo-Saxon poets of Dark Age England used for fate highlights this ironic, circling, swerving logic; they called it wyrd—a word related to a lot of other w-r words still existing in our language that connote twisting and turning (worm, wrap, writhe, wreath, wring, and so on—even word, which, as writers know, is made of bendy-twisty marks on paper or stone). Wyrd, or weird, is the bending force in our lives that, among other things, causes dark prophecies to be fulfilled not only despite but actually because of our best efforts at preventing them. It also warps our mind and induces a kind of compulsion around more appealing-sounding prophecies, as it did to Shakespeare’s Macbeth after hearing the Weird Sisters’ prophecy that he would become king. When we realize that the Minkowski block universe, in its resolute self-consistency, imposes a wyrd-like law upon us (a “law in the cosmos,” you might call it), then all those antique myths about prophecy and the ironic insistency of fate start to appear less like the superstitions of benighted folk in the Back When and start to seem remarkably, well, prescient. And not only prescient, but based on real-life experience with prescience. Divination was an important part of Greek culture, for instance; it was even the basis of their medicine. Sick patients went to temples and caves to have healing dreams in the presence of priests who could interpret their dreams’ signs. They were not strangers to this stuff, as we now are. As intrinsically precognitive beings who think of ourselves as freely willed, the logic of wyrd is our ruler. We can’t go anywhere that would prevent ourselves from existing, prevent ourselves from getting to the experiences and realizations ahead of us that will turn out to have retroinfluenced our lives now, and this imposes a kind of blindness on us. That blindness may keep us from going insane, reducing the level of prophecy to a manageable level. It is why our dreamlife only shows us the future as through a glass, darkly. It is also why the world seems so tricksterish to those who are really paying attention. That we are interfered with by an intelligence that is somehow within us but also Other is the human intuition that Freud theorized in such a radical new way. His focus was on how this Other inside could make us ill; the flip side is that it really does serve as our guide, especially when we let ourselves be led by our unreason. Research shows that “psi” is an unconscious, un-willed function or group of functions.2 The laboratory experiments by Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, and many others strongly support something like presentiment (future-feeling) operating outside of conscious awareness, and it could be a pervasive feature or even a basic underlying principle of our psychology.
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Eric Wargo (Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self: Interpreting Messages from Your Future (A Sacred Planet Book))
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It was like a magic spell in a fairy story; if he could stop us seeing the worst of his pain, then it was not real. But I suppose we all need the blanket of fiction to make the worst of times manageable.
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G. Lawrence (The Bastard Princess (The Elizabeth of England Chronicles, #1))
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What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of “free” individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a “conductor state.” The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management.
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Paul Edward Gottfried (After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State.)
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Nowhere but in England are the papers so full of fascinating misbehaviour. There is always a scandal brewing, there is always a politician, village vicar or bank manager being pilloried, yet at the same time the country breathes a remarkable sense of order.
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Geert Mak
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Do you know what you’re doing?’
It would have been nice to reply with, ‘Well, I’ve never done an operation before, but I’ve seen heaps on Grey’s Anatomy and I’m really keen to give one a crack,’ but the only time I manage witty repartee is in the privacy of my own bedroom, when I’m imagining how the conversation might have gone if only I was brave. ‘Yes,’ I said gravely, drawing anaesthetic into a syringe. ‘I’ve done lots of caesareans. My last job was at a small-animal practice in England.
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Danielle Hawkins (Chocolate Cake for Breakfast)
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Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?
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Lee Child (Killing Floor (Jack Reacher, #1))
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Meredith Etherington-Smith
Meredith Etherington-Smith became an editor of Paris Vogue in London and GQ magazine in the United States during the 1970s. During the 1980s, she served as deputy and features editor of Harpers & Queen magazine and has since become a leading art critic. Currently, she is editor in chief of Christie’s magazine. She is also a noted artist biographer; her book on Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, was an international bestseller and was translated into a dozen languages.
Her drawing room that morning was much like any comfortable, slightly formal drawing room to be found in country houses throughout England: the paintings, hung on pale yellow walls, were better; the furniture, chintz-covered; the flowers, natural garden bouquets. It was charming. And so was she, as she swooped in from a room beyond. I had never seen pictures of her without any makeup, with just-washed hair and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. She looked more vital, more beautiful, than any photograph had ever managed to convey. She was, in a word, staggering; here was the most famous woman in the world up close, relaxed, funny, and warm. The tragic Diana, the royal Diana, the wronged Diana: a clever, interesting person who wasn’t afraid to say she didn’t know how an auction sale worked, and would it be possible to work with me on it?
“Of course, ma’am,” I said. “It’s your sale, and if you would like, then we’ll work on it together to make the most money we can for your charities.” “So what do we do next?” she asked me. “First, I think you had better choose the clothes for sale.” The next time I saw her drawing room, Paul Burrell, her butler, had wheeled in rack after rack of jeweled, sequined, embroidered, and lacy dresses, almost all of which I recognized from photographs of the Princess at some state event or gala evening. The visible relics of a royal life that had ended.
The Princess, in another pair of immaculately pressed jeans and a stripy shirt, looked so different from these formal meringues that it was almost laughable. I think at that point the germ of an idea entered my mind: that sometime, when I had gotten to know her better and she trusted me, I would like to see photographs of the “new” Princess Diana--a modern woman unencumbered by the protocol of royal dress. Eventually, this idea led to putting together the suite of pictures of this sea-change princess with Mario Testino.
I didn’t want her to wear jewels; I wanted virtually no makeup and completely natural hair. “But Meredith, I always have people do my hair and makeup,” she explained. “Yes ma’am, but I think it is time for a change--I want Mario to capture your speed, and electricity, the real you and not the Princess.” She laughed and agreed, but she did turn up at the historic shoot laden with her turquoise leather jewel boxes. We never opened them. Hair and makeup took ten minutes, and she came out of the dressing room looking breathtaking. The pictures are famous now; they caused a sensation at the time. My favorite memory of Princess Diana is when I brought the work prints round to Kensington Palace for her to look at. She was so keen to see them that she raced down the stairs and grabbed them. She went silent for a moment or two as she looked at these vivid, radiant images. Then she turned to me and said, “But these are really me. I’ve been set free and these show it. Don’t you think,” she asked me, “that I look a bit like Marilyn Monroe in some of them?” And laughed.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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Kien Long, Emperor of China. He was inquiring of Sir George the manner in which physicians were paid in England. When, after some difficulty, his majesty was made to comprehend the system, he exclaimed, 'Is any man well in England that can afford to be ill? Now, I will inform you,' said he, 'how I manage my physicians. I have four, to whom the care of my health is committed: a certain weekly salary is allowed them; but the moment I am ill the salary stops till I am well again. I need not tell you that my illnesses are usually short.'" Zimmerman
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Various (The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes Historical, Literary, and Humorous - A New Selection)
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Ken Wharfe
In 1987, Ken Wharfe was appointed a personal protection officer to Diana. In charge of the Princess’s around-the-clock security at home and abroad, in public and in private, Ken Wharfe became a close friend and loyal confidant who shared her most private moments. After Diana’s death, Inspector Wharfe was honored by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and made a Member of the Victorian Order, a personal gift of the sovereign for his loyal service to her family. His book, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller. He is a regular contributor with the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NBC, CBS, and CNN, participating in numerous outside broadcasts and documentaries for BBC--Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Channel 5 News, News 24, and GMTV.
My memory of Diana is not her at an official function, dazzling with her looks and clothes and the warmth of her manner, or even of her offering comfort among the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed. What I remember best is a young woman taking a walk in a beautiful place, unrecognized, carefree, and happy.
Diana increasingly craved privacy, a chance “to be normal,” to have the opportunity to do what, in her words, “ordinary people” do every day of their lives--go shopping, see friends, go on holiday, and so on--away from the formality and rituals of royal life. As someone responsible for her security, yet understanding her frustration, I was sympathetic. So when in the spring of the year in which she would finally be separated from her husband, Prince Charles, she yet again raised the suggestion of being able to take a walk by herself, I agreed that such a simple idea could be realized.
Much of my childhood had been spent on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, a county in southern England approximately 120 miles from London; I remembered the wonderful sandy beaches of Studland Bay, on the approach to Poole Harbour.
The idea of walking alone on miles of almost deserted sandy beach was something Diana had not even dared dream about. At this time she was receiving full twenty-four-hour protection, and it was at my discretion how many officers should be assigned to her protection. “How will you manage it, Ken? What about the backup?” she asked. I explained that this venture would require us to trust each other, and she looked at me for a moment and nodded her agreement.
And so, early one morning less than a week later, we left Kensington Palace and drove to the Sandbanks ferry at Poole in an ordinary saloon car. As we gazed at the coastline from the shabby viewing deck of the vintage chain ferry, Diana’s excitement was obvious, yet not one of the other passengers recognized her. But then, no one would have expected the most photographed woman in the world to be aboard the Studland chain ferry on a sunny spring morning in May.
As the ferry docked after its short journey, we climbed back into the car and then, once the ramp had been lowered, drove off in a line of cars and service trucks heading for Studland and Swanage. Diana was driving, and I asked her to stop in a sand-covered area about half a mile from the ferry landing point. We left the car and walked a short distance across a wooded bridge that spanned a reed bed to the deserted beach of Shell Bay. Her simple pleasure at being somewhere with no one, apart from me, knowing her whereabouts was touching to see.
Diana looked out toward the Isle of Wight, anxious by now to set off on her walk to the Old Harry Rocks at the western extremity of Studland Bay. I gave her a personal two-way radio and a sketch map of the shoreline she could expect to see, indicating a landmark near some beach huts at the far end of the bay, a tavern or pub, called the Bankes Arms, where I would meet her.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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In another invaluable service to the Allies, the resistance movements in every captive country helped rescue and spirit back to England thousands of British and American pilots downed behind enemy lines, as well as other Allied servicemen caught in German-held territory. In Belgium, for example, a young woman named Andrée de Jongh set up an escape route called the Comet Line through her native country and France, manned mostly by her friends, to return Britons and Americans to England. De Jongh herself escorted more than one hundred servicemen over the Pyrenees Mountains to safety in neutral Spain. As de Jongh and her colleagues knew, being active in the resistance, regardless of gender, was far more perilous than fighting on the battlefield or in the air. If captured, uniformed servicemen on the Western front were sent to prisoner of war camps, where Geneva Convention rules usually applied. When resistance members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a German concentration camp, and/or execution. The danger of capture was particularly great for those who sheltered British or American fighting men, most of whom did not speak the language of the country in which they were hiding and who generally stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide and feed a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman of six feet, three inches, or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.” James Langley, the head of a British agency that aided the European escape lines, later estimated that, for every Englishman or American rescued, at least one resistance worker lost his or her life. Andrée de Jongh managed to escape that fate. Caught in January 1943 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, she survived the war because, although she freely admitted to creating the Comet Line, the Germans could not believe that a young girl had devised such an intricate operation. IN
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Lynne Olson (Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour)
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During the year before Shara and I got married, I managed to persuade the owners of a small island, situated in Poole Harbor, to let me winter house-sit the place in return for free lodging.
It was a brilliant deal.
Chopping logs, keeping an eye on the place, doing a bit of maintenance, and living like a king on a beautiful twenty-acre island off the south coast of England.
Some months earlier, I had been walking along a riverbank outside of London when I had spotted a little putt-putt fishing boat with an old 15 hp engine on the back. She was covered in mold and looked on her last legs, but I noticed her name, painted carefully on the side.
She was called Shara. What were the chances of that?
I bought her on the spot, with what was pretty well my last £800.
Shara became my pride and joy. And I was the only person who could get the temperamental engine to start! I used the boat, though, primarily, as my way of going backward and forward to the small island.
I had done some properly dicey crossings in Shara during the middle of that winter. Often done late at night, after an evening out, the three-mile crossing back to the island could be treacherous in bad weather. Freezing waves would crash over the bows, threatening to swamp the boat, and the old engine would often start cutting in and out.
I had no nav-lights, no waterproofs, no life jacket, and no radio. And that meant no backup plan--which is bad.
Totally irresponsible. But totally fun.
I held my stag weekend over there with my best buddies--Ed, Mick, Neil, Charlie, Nige (one of Shara’s uni friends who has become such a brilliant buddy), Trucker, Watty, Stan, and Hugo--and it was a wild one.
Charlie ended up naked on a post in the middle of the harbor, we got rescued twice having broken down trying to water-ski behind the underpowered Shara, and we had a huge bonfire while playing touch-rugby by firelight.
Perfect.
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Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
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Ten months after Jamie’s death, the 2006 football season began. The Colts played peerless football, winning their first nine games, and finishing the year 12–4. They won their first play-off game, and then beat the Baltimore Ravens for the divisional title. At that point, they were one step away from the Super Bowl, playing for the conference championship—the game that Dungy had lost eight times before. The matchup occurred on January 21, 2007, against the New England Patriots, the same team that had snuffed out the Colts’ Super Bowl aspirations twice. The Colts started the game strong, but before the first half ended, they began falling apart. Players were afraid of making mistakes or so eager to get past the final Super Bowl hurdle that they lost track of where they were supposed to be focusing. They stopped relying on their habits and started thinking too much. Sloppy tackling led to turnovers. One of Peyton Manning’s passes was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. Their opponents, the Patriots, pulled ahead 21 to 3. No team in the history of the NFL had ever overcome so big a deficit in a conference championship. Dungy’s team, once again, was going to lose.3.36 At halftime, the team filed into the locker room, and Dungy asked everyone to gather around. The noise from the stadium filtered through the closed doors, but inside everyone was quiet. Dungy looked at his players. They had to believe, he said. “We faced this same situation—against this same team—in 2003,” Dungy told them. In that game, they had come within one yard of winning. One yard. “Get your sword ready because this time we’re going to win. This is our game. It’s our time.”3.37 The Colts came out in the second half and started playing as they had in every preceding game. They stayed focused on their cues and habits. They carefully executed the plays they had spent the past five years practicing until they had become automatic. Their offense, on the opening drive, ground out seventy-six yards over fourteen plays and scored a touchdown. Then, three minutes after taking the next possession, they scored again. As the fourth quarter wound down, the teams traded points. Dungy’s Colts tied the game, but never managed to pull ahead. With 3:49 left in the game, the Patriots scored, putting Dungy’s players at a three-point disadvantage, 34 to 31. The Colts got the ball and began driving down the field. They moved seventy yards in nineteen seconds, and crossed into the end zone. For the first time, the Colts had the lead, 38 to 34. There were now sixty seconds left on the clock. If Dungy’s team could stop the Patriots from scoring a touchdown, the Colts would win. Sixty seconds is an eternity in football.
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Charles Duhigg (The Power Of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life And Business)
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I’ve just been to see Audrey,” Beatrix said breathlessly, entering the private upstairs parlor and closing the door. “Poor Mr. Phelan isn’t well, and--well, I’ll tell you about that in a minute, but--here’s a letter from Captain Phelan!”
Prudence smiled and took the letter. “Thank you, Bea. Now, about the officers I met last night…there was a dark-haired lieutenant who asked me to dance, and he--”
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Beatrix asked, watching in dismay as Prudence laid the letter on a side table.
Prudence gave her a quizzical smile. “My, you’re impatient today. You want me to open it this very moment?”
”Yes.” Beatrix promptly sat in a chair upholstered with flower-printed fabric.
“But I want to tell you about the lieutenant.”
“I don’t give a monkey about the lieutenant, I want to hear about Captain Phelan.”
Prudence gave a low chuckle. “I haven’t seen you this excited since you stole that fox that Lord Campdon imported from France last year.”
“I didn’t steal him, I rescued him. Importing a fox for a hunt…I call that very unsporting.” Beatrix gestured to the letter. “Open it!”
Prudence broke the seal, skimmed the letter, and shook her head in amused disbelief. “Now he’s writing about mules.” She rolled her eyes and gave Beatrix the letter.
Miss Prudence Mercer
Stony Cross
Hampshire, England
7 November 1854
Dear Prudence,
Regardless of the reports that describe the British soldier as unflinching, I assure you that when riflemen are under fire, we most certainly duck, bob, and run for cover. Per your advice, I have added a sidestep and a dodge to my repertoire, with excellent results. To my mind, the old fable has been disproved: there are times in life when one definitely wants to be the hare, not the tortoise.
We fought at the southern port of Balaklava on the twenty-fourth of October. Light Brigade was ordered to charge directly into a battery of Russian guns for no comprehensible reason. Five cavalry regiments were mowed down without support. Two hundred men and nearly four hundred horses lost in twenty minutes. More fighting on the fifth of November, at Inkerman.
We went to rescue soldiers stranded on the field before the Russians could reach them. Albert went out with me under a storm of shot and shell, and helped to identify the wounded so we could carry them out of range of the guns. My closest friend in the regiment was killed.
Please thank your friend Prudence for her advice for Albert. His biting is less frequent, and he never goes for me, although he’s taken a few nips at visitors to the tent.
May and October, the best-smelling months? I’ll make a case for December: evergreen, frost, wood smoke, cinnamon. As for your favorite song…were you aware that “Over the Hills and Far Away” is the official music of the Rifle Brigade?
It seems nearly everyone here has fallen prey to some kind of illness except for me. I’ve had no symptoms of cholera nor any of the other diseases that have swept through both divisions. I feel I should at least feign some kind of digestive problem for the sake of decency.
Regarding the donkey feud: while I have sympathy for Caird and his mare of easy virtue, I feel compelled to point out that the birth of a mule is not at all a bad outcome. Mules are more surefooted than horses, generally healthier, and best of all, they have very expressive ears. And they’re not unduly stubborn, as long they’re managed well. If you wonder at my apparent fondness for mules, I should probably explain that as a boy, I had a pet mule named Hector, after the mule mentioned in the Iliad.
I wouldn’t presume to ask you to wait for me, Pru, but I will ask that you write to me again. I’ve read your last letter more times than I can count. Somehow you’re more real to me now, two thousand miles away, than you ever were before.
Ever yours,
Christopher
P.S. Sketch of Albert included
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
“
Holderman,” the earl began in those low tones that presaged a volcanic display, “slavery and trade therein were outlawed almost a decade ago here in merry old England. Moreover, I have no less than nine younger siblings, and I can tell you that is a child, not chattel per se, and thus cannot convey. Make it go away.” “I am afraid I cannot quite manage just precisely what you ask.” Holderman cleared his throat again. “Holderman,” the earl replied with terrifying pleasantness, “the thing cannot weigh but three stone. You pick it up and tell it to run along. Tell it to go ’round the kitchen and filch a meat pie, but make it go away.” “Well, my lord, as to that…” “Holderman.” The earl crossed his arms over his muscled chest and speared the land steward with a look that had no doubt quelled insurrection in junior officers, younger siblings, miscreant horses, and drunken peers, regardless of rank. “Make. It. Go. Away.” Holderman, in a complete abdication of courage, merely shook his head and stared at the ground. “Fine.” The earl sighed. “I shall do it myself, as it appears I have to do every other benighted task worth mentioning on this miserable excuse for a parody of an estate. You, off!” He stabbed a finger in the general direction of the distant hills and bellowed at the child as he advanced on the fountain. The child stood up on the rim of the dry fountain—which still left the earl a towering advantage of height—pointed a much smaller finger in the same direction and bellowed right back, “You, off!” ***
”
”
Grace Burrowes (The Soldier (Duke's Obsession, #2; Windham, #2))
“
At OBSS An unexpected occurrence did come of this escapade, even though I didn’t care for the program. Andy, you may or may not be aware that Outward Bound teaches interpersonal and leadership skills, not to mention wilderness survival. The first two skillsets were not unlike our education at the Enlightened Royal Oracle Society (E.R.O.S.) or the Dale Carnegie course in which I had participated before leaving Malaya for school in England. It was the wilderness survival program I abhorred. Since I wasn’t rugged by nature (and remain that way to this day), this arduous experience was made worse by your absence. In 1970, OBSS was under the management of Singapore Ministry of Defence, and used primarily as a facility to prepare young men for compulsory ’National Service,’ commonly known as NS. All young and able 18+ Singaporean male citizens and second-generation permanent residents had to register for National Service compulsorily. They would serve either a two-year or twenty-two-month period as Full Time National Servicemen after completing the Outward Bound course. Pending on their individual physical and medical fitness, these young men would enter the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), Singapore Police Force (SPF), or the Singapore Civil Defense Force (SCDF). Father, through his extensive contacts, enrolled me into the twenty-one-day Outward Bound summer course. There were twenty boys in my class. We were divided into small units under the guidance of an instructor. During the first few days at the base camp, we trained for outdoor recreation activities such as adventure racing, backpacking, cycling, camping, canoeing, canyoning, fishing, hiking, kayaking, mountaineering, horseback riding, photography, rock climbing, running, sailing, skiing, swimming, and a variety of sporting activities.
”
”
Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
“
Gayle? Is this what you want?” He looked up at her use of his name, a sad smile breaking through his frown. “It is what must be, Anna.” He kept his hands in his pockets. He did not reach for her. “You are a well-bred young lady, and I am a bachelor of some repute. If it becomes known you are under my roof without chaperonage, then your future will be bleak.” More bleak, Anna wanted to rail, than when Stull and Helmsley were hounding me across England? “I will miss you,” Anna said, turning her back to him, the better to hide her tears. God above, she’d turned into a watering pot since getting involved with the earl. “I beg your pardon?” He’d stepped closer, close enough she could catch his scent. “I will miss you,” Anna said, whirling and walking straight into him. She wrapped her arms around his waist and clung, while his arms gently closed around her. “I will miss you and miss you and miss you.” “Oh, love.” He stroked the back of her head. “You mustn’t cry over this. You’ll manage, and so will I, and it’s for the best.” She nodded but made no move to pull away, and he held her as closely as her wounded shoulder would allow.
”
”
Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))