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After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.
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Ann Richards
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Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that.
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Roger Scruton (The Soul of the World)
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
- Rogers Commission Report into the Challenger Crash, June 1986.
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Richard P. Feynman
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Richard Rogers was lecturing at Wethersfield, Essex, someone told him, “Mr. Rogers, I like you and your company very well, but you are so precise.” To which Rogers replied, “O Sir, I serve a precise God.
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Leland Ryken (Worldly Saints)
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We have nothing to live but life itself.
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Roger Ebert
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For most of us insist that somewhere in the past there was a golden age. But people who are forever dreaming of a mythical past are merely saying that they are afraid of the future. The past which men create for themselves is a place where thought is unnecessary and happiness is inevitable. The American temperament leans generally to a kind of mystical anarchism. In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers
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Kurt Andersen (Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America)
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There are times I almost think I am not sure of what I absolutely know. Very often find confusion in conclusion I concluded long ago. In my head are many facts that, as a student, I have studied to procure. In my head are many facts of which I wish I was more certain I was sure.
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Richard Rogers
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In contrast to advice, our UN-VICE is not a suggestion of behavior or a mandate. Instead, our UN-VICE is a way to decipher changing circumstances imaginatively. All advice should be carefully considered, combined with an emphasis on developing and trusting our own capabilities.
In our increasingly UN-VICE world, the value of recommendations is rapidly decreasing. Systemic disruption has devalued ad-vice; instead, we offer our best UN-VICE. Inspired by Richard Feynman, we must explore unanswered questions, rather than adhering to unquestionable answers.
Zen Master Suzuki Roshi said “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Our UN-VICE draws from the three stages of the Japanese martial arts concept shuhari. In the first stage, shu, the student masters the established fundamentals. In the second stage, ha, the learner practices and experiments with novel approaches, guided by their own unique perspectives. In the third stage, ri, they break loose from confining rulebooks to adapt freely to any situation. Shuhari is a journey, a continuous process of learning, experimenting, and letting go.
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Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
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New Testament scholar Richard Hays notes that there is not “an exact equivalent for ‘homosexual’ in either Greek or Hebrew.”22 The Bible, in its original Hebrew and Greek, has no concept like our present understanding of a person with a homosexual orientation. Indeed, the concept of an ongoing sexual attraction to people of one’s own sex did not exist in European or American language until the late nineteenth century.23
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Jack Rogers (Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality, Revised and Expanded Edition: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church)
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Self-Management If you can read just one book on motivation—yours and others: Dan Pink, Drive If you can read just one book on building new habits: Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit If you can read just one book on harnessing neuroscience for personal change: Dan Siegel, Mindsight If you can read just one book on deep personal change: Lisa Lahey and Bob Kegan, Immunity to Change If you can read just one book on resilience: Seth Godin, The Dip Organizational Change If you can read just one book on how organizational change really works: Chip and Dan Heath, Switch If you can read just two books on understanding that change is a complex system: Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations Dan Pontefract, Flat Army Hear interviews with FREDERIC LALOUX, DAN PONTEFRACT, and JERRY STERNIN at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just one book on using structure to change behaviours: Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto If you can read just one book on how to amplify the good: Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance If you can read just one book on increasing your impact within organizations: Peter Block, Flawless Consulting Other Cool Stuff If you can read just one book on being strategic: Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley, Playing to Win If you can read just one book on scaling up your impact: Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence If you can read just one book on being more helpful: Edgar Schein, Helping Hear interviews with ROGER MARTIN, BOB SUTTON, and WARREN BERGER at the Great Work Podcast. If you can read just two books on the great questions: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question Dorothy Strachan, Making Questions Work If you can read just one book on creating learning that sticks: Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick If you can read just one book on why you should appreciate and marvel at every day, every moment: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything If you can read just one book that saves lives while increasing impact: Michael Bungay Stanier, ed., End Malaria (All money goes to Malaria No More; about $400,000 has been raised so far.) IF THERE ARE NO STUPID QUESTIONS, THEN WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS DO STUPID PEOPLE ASK?
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Michael Bungay Stanier (The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever)
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There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words hic incepit pestis, 'here began plague', in the burial part of the register three months later. Just how close this dread flea-borne disease was to the Shakespeares can be guaged from the fact that their Henley Street neighbour Roger Green lost four of his children and town clerk Richard Symons three. One estimate suggests that the town lost around two hundred, or about fifteen per cent, of its population during this single outbreak. It is a sobering thought how much the world could have lost at this time by one ill-chanced flea-bite.
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Ian Wilson (Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and His Work)
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We also have to consider the many different kinds of rape we have learned about over the past few years as conservative politicians blunder through trying to explain their stances on sexual violence and abortion.
For instance, Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, running for the US Senate in 2012, said, in a debate, "I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins int hat horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen." I've been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God can also believe that anything born of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God's intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions.
Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Former Missouri representative Todd Akin believes in "legitimate rape" and the oxymoronic "forcible rape," not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul believes in the existence of "honest rape," but turns a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. Former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, "they rape so easy." Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, failed Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of "emergency rape." Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile the belief that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate working to hold women down. We can, I suppose, take comfort in knowing that none of these people is in a position of power anymore.
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Roxane Gay
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It is a repeated error among intellectual historians to assume that ideas have a self-contained history of their own, and that one idea gives rise to another in something like the way one weather system gives rise to the next. Marxists, who regard ideas as by-products of economic forces, commit the opposite error, dismissing the intellectual life as entirely subservient to material causes. The vast and destructive influence of Marxist theory is a clear disproof of what it says. As the American conservative Richard Weaver put it, in the title of a famous and influential book, Ideas Have Consequences (1948), and this is as true of conservative ideas as it is of ideas propagated on the left. To understand the pre-history of conservatism, therefore, one should accept that ideas have far-reaching influence over human affairs; but one should recognise also that they do not arise only from other ideas, and often have roots in biological, social and political conditions that lie deeper than rational argument.
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Roger Scruton (Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition)
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Both Cooper and Brennan got their start as extras. Like Brennan, Cooper had learned his craft by roaming around movie lots, absorbing the atmosphere and watching how things were done—especially the subtle interplay between actors, and between the best actors and the camera lens, which always picked up details that not even the most perceptive directors could spot before they were projected onto a screen. And like Brennan, when Cooper got his first two minutes of screen time, he was prepared. Watch him in Wings, playing an aviator about to go to his death, enter a tent and converse with the film’s two stars, Buddy Rogers and Richard Arlen, who are immediately fascinated by his bluff allure. He is a hero without bravado. He is for those two minutes the picture’s star, the very embodiment of what Hemingway called grace under pressure. Cooper’s ability to convey composure just before a dogfight, to act with such quiet courtesy and aplomb, stuns Rogers and Arlen—and just that quickly Cooper takes the picture away from them.
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Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
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Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today—that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each—will only be about fifty bones, one quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say of course that any of these bones will actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 3.6 million square miles, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, it would be something of a miracle if they were. Fossils are in every sense vanishingly rare. Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all. It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record. That in itself is a stunningly infinitesimal proportion. However, if you accept the common estimate that the Earth has produced 30 billion species of creature in its time and Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s statement (in The Sixth Extinction) that there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record, that reduces the proportion to just one in 120,000. Either way, what we possess is the merest sampling of all the life that Earth has spawned. Moreover, the record
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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Nietzsche is a favourite, since he made the point explicitly: ‘There are no truths,’ he wrote, ‘only interpretations.’ Either what Nietzsche said is true – in which case it is not true, since there are no truths – or it is false. But it is only from the standpoint of the Enlightenment that this response seems like a refutation. The new curriculum is in the business of marginalizing refutation, just as it marginalizes truth. This explains the appeal of those recent thinkers – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty – who owe their intellectual eminence not to their arguments but to their role in giving authority to the rejection of authority, and to their absolute commitment to the impossibility of absolute commitments. In each of them you find the view that truth, objectivity, value or meaning are chimerical, and that all we can have, and all we need to have, is the warm security of our own opinion.1 Hence it is in vain to argue against the new authorities. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive ‘will to believe’ that captures their normal readers. After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they ‘put in question’ – namely, the possibility of rational argument. Each of them owes his reputation to a kind of religious faith: faith in the relativity of all opinions, including this one. For this is the faith on which a new form of membership is founded – a first-person plural of denial.
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Roger Scruton (How to Be a Conservative)
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In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia.
One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War.
The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets.
Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened.
To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses:
Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types.
On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge.
Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.
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Jonathan Glover (Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century)
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It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.
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Bill Bryson (One Summer: America, 1927)
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For instance, Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, running for the US Senate in 2012, said, in a debate, “I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen.” I’ve been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God can also believe that anything born of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God’s intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions. Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Former Missouri representative Todd Akin believes in “legitimate rape” and the oxymoronic “forcible rape,” not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul believes in the existence of “honest rape,” but turns a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. Former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, “they rape so easy.” Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, failed Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of “emergency rape.” Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile the belief that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate working to hold women down. We can, I suppose, take comfort in knowing that none of these people is in a position of power anymore.
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Roxane Gay (Bad Feminist)
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In the fall of 2006, I participated in a three-day conference at the Salk Institute entitled Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival. This event was organized by Roger Bingham and conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins, and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic opponents of religious dogmatism and superstition. It was a room full of highly intelligent, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists, physicists, and engineers—and yet, to my amazement, three days were insufficient to force agreement on the simple question of whether there is any conflict at all between religion and science. Imagine a meeting of mountaineers unable to agree about whether their sport ever entails walking uphill, and you will get a sense of how bizarre our deliberations began to seem.
While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most dishonest religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a peerless champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is both morally principled and completely uncontaminated by religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President’s Council on Bioethics. Over the course of the conference, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were examples of secular reason run amok, that the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad are not the cause of Islamic terrorism, that people can never be argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made no important contributions to our ethical lives (and cannot), and that it is not the job of scientists to undermine ancient mythologies and, thereby, “take away people’s hope”—all from atheist scientists who, while insisting on their own skeptical hardheadedness, were equally adamant that there was something feckless and foolhardy, even indecent, about criticizing religious belief. There were several moments during our panel discussions that brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: people who looked like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs, nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious obscurantism at the slightest prodding. I had previously imagined that the front lines in our culture wars were to be found at the entrance to a megachurch. I now realized that we have considerable work to do in a nearer trench.
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Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values)
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Ralph Grandison Templar knight Reginald Ausel Master of St Giles lazar hospital Edmund Datchet Templar knight Master Crowthorne Leech at St Giles lazar hospital Walter Burghesh Templar captain Roger Stapleton Templar knight Sir Peter Mausley Leper knight Richard Puddlicot Master felon
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Paul Doherty (Dark Serpent (Hugh Corbett, #18))
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Maybe Sandoval and Roger can share a room. Do puzzles and go to physical therapy together. Maybe discover that they both secretly love Jell-O. Have a real TV-movie bonding experience.
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Richard Kadrey (Hollywood Dead (Sandman Slim, #10))
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Sunset. He had promised her until sunset. “If something goes wrong, we need to get her out.”
Miles Dorrington looked thoughtful. “I say, we could raise the Jolly Roger and storm the fort as pirates. While they’re panicking, you sneak in and retrieve Jane.”
“Too many cannons,” said Jack tersely. “You’ll be blown to splinters before we can get inside. Next?”
Lizzy raised her crossbow. “I could—”
“No,” said Jack and his father in unison. When Jack had finished glaring at his father, he said, “Jane and I discussed this. If she’s not back by sundown, Lord Richard and I”—Jack nodded to the blond man, who nodded back—“will go after her disguised as dragoons.”
Lord Richard quickly took charge. “I’ll see that my men acquire the relevant uniforms.”
“No,” said Jack’s new stepmother.
“No?” Jack looked narrowly at his stepmother. “What do you propose, then?”
His stepmother paced decisively down the deck. “Richard”—Lord Richard leaped agilely out of range of her parasol—“will stay and mind the
Bien-Aimée . If Jane isn’t back by sundown”—Jack’s stepmother regarded him imperiously—“you and I will go after her.”
“Gwen is very good at rappelling down walls,” said Jack’s father, looking at his bride with gooey eyes. “Up them, too.”
“We’re not rappelling,” said Jack. If there was anything he hated, it was rappelling. It was as showy and useless as swinging through windows on ropes. “We’re going through the door.”
“I’ve known that girl since she was born.” His stepmother stalked towards him, parasol point glinting. “I’ve protected her from more assailants than you’ve had hot suppers. If you go, I go.”
“How lovely,” said Lady Henrietta brightly. “You can get to know each other.”
Miles Dorrington prudently lifted his wife by the waist and deposited her out of parasol range.
“We don’t know that she’ll need rescuing,” said Jack, staring down his new stepmother. “The plan might go as planned.”
His stepmother snorted. “With the Gardener? I’ll go get my pistols.”
And she departed, leaving Jack with a sick feeling at the pit of his stomach as he tried not to contemplate what the Gardener might be doing with Jane right now.
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Lauren Willig (The Lure of the Moonflower (Pink Carnation, #12))
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Many Americans wonder why Robert Kennedy took no action against Lyndon Johnson if he suspected the vice president’s complicity in the murder of his brother. In fact, we now know that Johnson was concerned that Robert Kennedy would object to his immediate ascendancy to the presidency. The very fact that Johnson would worry about something so constitutionally preordained virtually proved Johnson’s fear that Kennedy would see through his role in the murder. I now believe that Johnson’s call to Robert Kennedy to obtain the wording of the presidential oath was an act of obsequiousness to test Kennedy as well as an opportunity to twist the knife in Johnson’s bitter rival. We now know that the “oath” aboard Air Force One was purely symbolic; the US Constitution elevates the vice president to the presidency automatically upon the death of the president. Johnson’s carefully arranged ceremony in which he insisted that Jackie Kennedy be present was to put his imprimatur and that of the Kennedys, on his presidency. Additionally, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, who administered the oath, had recently been blocked from elevation on the federal bench by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This impediment would be removed under President Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy knew his brother was murdered by a domestic conspiracy and, at a minimum, suspected that Lyndon Johnson was complicit. Kennedy would tell his aide Richard Goodwin, “there’s nothing I can do about it. Not now.”86 In essence, Kennedy understood that with both the FBI and the Justice Department under the control of Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy nemesis J. Edgar Hoover, there was, indeed, nothing he could do immediately. While numerous biographers describe RFK as being shattered by the murder of his brother, Robert Kennedy was not so bereaved that it prevented him from seeking to maneuver his way onto the 1964 ticket as vice president. Indeed, RFK had Jackie Kennedy call Johnson to lobby for Bobby’s selection. Johnson declined, far too cunning to put Bobby in the exact position that he had maneuvered John Kennedy into three years previous. Robert Kennedy knew that only by becoming president could he avenge his brother’s death. After lukewarm endorsements of the Warren Commission’s conclusions between 1963 and 1968, while campaigning in the California primary, RFK would be asked about his brother’s murder. In the morning, he mumbled half-hearted support for the Warren Commission conclusions but asked the same question that afternoon he would tell a student audience in Northern California that if elected he would reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder. Kennedy’s highly regarded press secretary Frank Mankiewicz would say he was “shocked” by RFK’s comment because he had never said anything like it publicly before. Mankiewicz and Robert Kennedy aide Adam Walinsky would ultimately conclude that JFK had been murdered by a conspiracy, but to my knowledge, neither understood the full involvement of LBJ. Only days after Robert Kennedy said he would release all the records of the Kennedy assassination, the New York Senator would be killed in an assassination eerily similar to his brother’s, in which there are disputes, even today, about the number of shooters and the number of shots. The morning after Robert Kennedy was murdered a distraught Jacqueline Kennedy called close friend New York socialite Carter Burden, and said “They got Bobby, too,” leaving little doubt that she recognized that the same people who killed her husband also killed her brother in law.87
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Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
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Some readers found my depiction of Lyndon Johnson the man as stunning. Johnson was a course, crude, loudmouthed bully with an insatiable appetite for cigarettes, alcohol, and women. Far from the civil rights-crusading statesman that the media likes to portray, Johnson was epically corrupt, greedy, vain, manipulative, ambitious, vindictive, and nasty. LBJ was a sadist who enjoyed the discomfort of the people who worked for him and reveled in being viciously abusive to his rabidly loyal staff. Richard
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Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission Report (1986)
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Martin Kleppmann (Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems)
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Today’s Children, The Woman in White, and The Guiding Light crossed over and interchanged in respective storylines.) June 2, 1947–June 29, 1956, CBS. 15m weekdays at 1:45. Procter & Gamble’s Duz Detergent. CAST: 1937 to mid-1940s: Arthur Peterson as the Rev. John Ruthledge of Five Points, the serial’s first protagonist. Mercedes McCambridge as Mary Ruthledge, his daughter; Sarajane Wells later as Mary. Ed Prentiss as Ned Holden, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and taken in by the Ruthledges; Ned LeFevre and John Hodiak also as Ned. Ruth Bailey as Rose Kransky; Charlotte Manson also as Rose. Mignon Schrieber as Mrs. Kransky. Seymour Young as Jacob Kransky, Rose’s brother. Sam Wanamaker as Ellis Smith, the enigmatic “Nobody from Nowhere”; Phil Dakin and Raymond Edward Johnson also as Ellis. Henrietta Tedro as Ellen, the housekeeper. Margaret Fuller and Muriel Bremner as Fredrika Lang. Gladys Heen as Torchy Reynolds. Bill Bouchey as Charles Cunningham. Lesley Woods and Carolyn McKay as Celeste, his wife. Laurette Fillbrandt as Nancy Stewart. Frank Behrens as the Rev. Tom Bannion, Ruthledge’s assistant. The Greenman family, early characters: Eloise Kummer as Norma; Reese Taylor and Ken Griffin as Ed; Norma Jean Ross as Ronnie, their daughter. Transition from clergy to medical background, mid-1940s: John Barclay as Dr. Richard Gaylord. Jane Webb as Peggy Gaylord. Hugh Studebaker as Dr. Charles Matthews. Willard Waterman as Roger Barton (alias Ray Brandon). Betty Lou Gerson as Charlotte Wilson. Ned LeFevre as Ned Holden. Tom Holland as Eddie Bingham. Mary Lansing as Julie Collins. 1950s: Jone Allison as Meta Bauer. Lyle Sudrow as Bill Bauer. Charita Bauer as Bert, Bill’s wife, a role she would carry into television and play for three decades. Laurette Fillbrandt as Trudy Bauer. Glenn Walken as little Michael. Theo Goetz as Papa Bauer. James Lipton as Dr. Dick Grant. Lynn Rogers as Marie Wallace, the artist.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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Tatwine’s pet theory was that Heaven consisted of fun things like drinking and gambling and consorting with women, while Hell was an eternity of sitting on a cloud, singing hymns.
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Robert Broomall (Death and Glory: A Soldier with Richard the Lionheart, Part III (Roger of Huntley Book 3))
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Today, the site of the company's headquarters in Leadenhall Street lies underneath Richard Rogers' glass and metal Lloyd's building. No blue plaque marks the site of what Macaulay called the greatest corporation in the world, and certainly the only power to equal the Mughals by seizing political power across wide swathes of South Asia. But anyone seeking a monument to the company's legacy in the City need only look around them.
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William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire)
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Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” - Will Rogers
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Cary David Richards (The Joy of less: Discovering Your Inner Minimalist (The Joy of less #1))
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Looking as sharp as Sweeney Todd’s razor, Roger struck a formidable figure as he donned his smart clothes and tie. At times, he would often talk of the night of his career when he fought John Conteh. He took the defeat of that match very personally and would often punch out a drunk who scoffed at his midlands accent and his past pride and glory.
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Stephen Richards (Psycho Steve)
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Cooper caught a break with a featured role as a doomed aviator in Wings (1927), but Walter remained on the periphery, observing the unwritten rule that extras did not consort with stars, yet taking pride in work that reinforced the function of character actors. As character actress Beulah Bondi said, “We are the mortar between the bricks.” For Walter Brennan, it was enough to know that a chosen few—Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable—began as extras and ended as stars. For a television documentary, the actor Richard Arlen, one of the stars of Wings, was asked what Walter Brennan was like in these early days as an extra. “He was not too unlike Gary Cooper in his mannerisms in those days. A slow way of talking—very much like Will Rogers,” said Arlen. “Walter sounded very much like he does today. Very dry and one of the nicest men I’ve known.
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Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
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My late friend Roger Deakin always used to excuse his failure to weed his vegetable patch by saying ‘weeds do keep the roots moist’.
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Richard Mabey (Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants)
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convened) against domestic Violence. ARTICLE V The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of it's equal Suffrage in the Senate. ARTICLE VI All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. ARTICLE VII The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same. Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth. In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names, Go. WASHINGTON— Presid. and deputy from Virginia New Hampshire John Langdon Nicholas Gilman Massachusetts Nathaniel Gorham Rufus King Connecticut Wm. Saml. Johnson Roger Sherman New York Alexander Hamilton New Jersey Wil: Livingston David Brearley Wm. Paterson Jona: Dayton Pennsylvania B Franklin Thomas Mifflin Robt Morris Geo. Clymer Thos FitzSimons Jared Ingersoll James Wilson Gouv Morris Delaware Geo: Read Gunning Bedford jun John Dickinson Richard Bassett Jaco: Broom Maryland James Mchenry
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U.S. Government (The United States Constitution)
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The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved."- Richard Rogers Adapt
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Tyler Green (Self-Discipline:The Ultimate Guide To Greatness, Get Results Most People Can Only Dream Of (Self Confidence, Self Control, Mental Toughness, Willpower))
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RICHARD SHERMAN The Legion of Boom’s fearless leader also considers himself a master satirist, especially after using his weekly media face time to perform a skit. He mocked the NFL for being an organization run by hypocrites who fined Marshawn Lynch for not talking to the media. Roger Goodell & Co. are hypocrites on any number of levels. Sherman fits right in. He is well-paid, has loaded up on endorsements and has a Super Bowl ring. All this good fortune is a result of him being associated with the NFL. It has absolutely nothing to do with his satirical skills.
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Anonymous
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George Rogers Clark (1752-1818) was the highest ranking military officer on the western frontier in the American Revolution. He was also the brother of famed Freemason William Clark (of the Lewis and Clark expedition). A Freemason, George Rogers Clark's Lodge is unknown, but Abraham Lodge 8, Louisville conducted his Masonic funeral. In 1809, at age 57, Brother Clark suffered a stroke and fell into a fireplace, burning his leg so badly it required amputation. When Dr. Richard Ferguson, Master of Abraham Lodge, performed the amputation, the only anesthetic Brother Clark received was music from a fife and drum corps playing in the background.
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Steven L. Harrison (Freemasons: Tales From The Craft)
Richard Rogers (Revelation)
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There is another legal sense of the word "copyright" much emphasized by several English justices.
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R.R. Bowker (Copyright: Its History and Its Law)
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make no apology for this being a visionary book, a fierce book, a prose version of a portrait in pinks and lilacs and orange and yellow; a book about more than it seems at first to be about, in which the fame of great stars is to be contrasted with our own unimportance and silliness.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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El principal error que cometemos es gastar dinero para comprar cosas que no necesitamos para impresionar a gente que ni siquiera nos cae bien. – Will Rogers
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Richard Gracia (El Método RICO: La guía definitiva para conseguir ÉXITO y DINERO. Reduce tus gastos, elimina tus deudas, aprende a ahorrar e invertir y alcanza tu LIBERTAD FINANCIERA. (Spanish Edition))
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For further nonfiction reading on the Dozier School (not a complete list), read: We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys by Erin Kimmerle The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South by Robin Gaby Fisher The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice by David Kushner I Survived Dozier: The Deadliest Reform School in America by Richard Huntly The White House Boys: An American Tragedy by Roger Dean Kiser The Dozier School for Boys: Forensics, Survivors, and a Painful Past by Elizabeth A. Murray, PhD The Boys of Dozier by Daryl McKenzie Lies Uncovered: The Long Journey Home—The Truth About the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys by Duane C. Fernandez, Sr. It Still Hurts: My Father’s Painful Account of Survival at the Florida Industrial School for Boys by Marshelle Smith Berry and Salih Izzaldin, edited by Joseph Carroll
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Tananarive Due (The Reformatory)
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Michael Kidd, one of New York’s best choreographers, had already been working in Hollywood, but on Seven Brides he was essential, as his extremely athletic style matched the aggressive nature of the backwoodsman avatar. And, in a unique casting scheme, the brothers and brides were primarily dancers. Keel and Powell of course were singers, and, further, MGM was building Jeff Richards as a jeune premier and insisted on making him one of the brothers. A former baseball player, Richards was anything but a ballroom whiz, and Kidd had to work around him—Richards is especially awkward in “Goin’ Co’tin’,” ensconced in a chair almost throughout while Powell teaches his brothers how to dance—and, at that, MGM ended up dubbing some of the boys and girls. But Seven Brides is a dance piece in a way even the Astaire-Rogers RKOs aren’t. They dance because Astaire dances. Seven Brides dances because that’s how we understand the difference between what men want women to be (chattel) and what women want men to be (nice to them).
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Ethan Mordden (When Broadway Went to Hollywood)
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The Grand Illusion
"No one can create an illusion for you but you, and no one can free you from an illusion but you." John-Roger, DSS
When I was on a trip to the USSR back in 1988 with J-R our group went to a Russian "Circus". I was anticipating lions and trapeze and tight rope walkers. What we saw there was much different than that, we saw a hypnotist. It was a huge arena that was filled to the gills and our group had our earphones in listening to the show through our group translator. As the "mesmerizer" hypnotized the entire hall he called out people to come down to the stage. Some in our group went down. Zombies alive!! I believe the translator was hypnotized as well.
It was wild.
I thought of this today thinking how we are in a world of illusion. The world that we "see" seems solid and firm but is made up of mostly space and vibration. We have hypnotized ourselves into believing we are victims or we are helpless, or we are stuck or fearful.
It's like a strongman believing he is weak. Superman has touched Kryptonite. The kryptonite is our misbeliefs. We believe we are in a limited world and we are the victims of that world.
In truth, we are part of God. We create our reality. We are powerful.
You create, promote, or allow everything in your life.
“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you
Don't go back to sleep!
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep!
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don't go back to sleep!”
-Rumi
Wake up to the wonder.
LLS
Richard Powell
Essence-into-form.com
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Richard L. Powell DSS (Essence Into Form: The Magic and Power of the Triangle of Manifestation)
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In 1976 the Republicans were not yet the party of unhinged mystical anarchism they became over the next four decades. Rather, after the unhappiness, unfriendliness, cynicism, paranoia, and finally the high crimes of Richard Nixon, Americans were eager to install Mr. Rogers in the White House—that is, sincere, low-key, straightforward Jimmy Carter, a devoutly Protestant goody-goody complete with toothy smile and cardigan sweater whom Reston hadn’t even mentioned as a contender in his New Year’s election preview.
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Kurt Andersen (Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America)
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It’s part Halloween, part metal show, and part pagan rite to some forgotten blood god. I remember Abbot told me that the virus can get into your brain and turn you strange. I just never imagined how many would be hit with it or how strange they would get. And he was right about something else too. Not all of the Shoggots are scarred. A fair number are as fresh-faced and normal looking as Mr. Rogers in his sweater.
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Richard Kadrey (King Bullet (Sandman Slim #12))
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Validity of MRM Aggregate ScoresRogers
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Richard Rogers (Conducting Miranda Evaluations: Applications of Psychological Expertise and Science within the Forensic Context)
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In his nearly twenty-five years as Chief Justice, Roger Bannon never once voted to overturn a death sentence. But what truly distinguished him was a driving lack of curiosity as to whether any of these defendants were, in fact, innocent.
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Richard North Patterson (Conviction (Christopher Paget #4))
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The poet-king al-Mutamid was exiled to Morocco. When Cordoba fell to the invaders, his daughter-in-law Princess Zaida fled to Alfonso, who made her his concubine before converting her to Christianity and marrying her as Queen Isabella. In 2018 newspapers claimed that the British queen Elizabeth II was descended from the Prophet Muhammad, citing Zaida as her ancestor. Zaida had two daughters; one, Elvira, married Roger, the Hauteville count of Sicily; the other, Sancha, is the progenitor of a line of royalty, via Richard earl of Cambridge and Mary queen of Scots, to George I. It is a link between Islam and Christendom from a more cosmopolitan time. Al-Mutamid was descended from the Arab kings, the Lakhm of Iraq – royalty older than the Prophet but not related to him – and al-Mutamid was Zaida’s father-in-law, not her father. There is no evidence Zaida, let alone Elizabeth II, was descended from Muhammad.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
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Boys were Detectives Pat Riley, Riley’s partner, Bobby Rockford, and Mac’s own partner, Richard Lich. When St. Paul Police Chief
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Roger Stelljes (Deadly Stillwater (McRyan Mystery, #2))
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Perhaps not unexpectedly, research revealed Michigan prison inmates whose cells faced a prison courtyard had 24 percent more illnesses than those whose cells had a view of farmland. In a similar vein, Roger Ulrich, a Texas A&M researcher, has shown that people who watch images of natural landscape after a stressful experience calm markedly in only five minutes: their muscle tension, pulse, and skin-conductance readings plummet.
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Richard Louv (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder)
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It's said that Richard Harding Davis was dispatched by William Randolph Hearst to cover the Johnstown flood. Here was his lead: "God stood on a mountaintop here and looked at what his waters had wrought." Hearst cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God.
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Roger Ebert (A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck)
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Jeb Magruder’s team’s chief operative, Herbert Porter, was the White House scheduling director. One of Porter’s masterpieces was hiring a young aide, Roger Stone, to contribute $200 to Pete McCloskey in the name of the militant homosexual group the Gay Liberation Front and forward the receipt to William Loeb (though Stone, ashamed of any imprecations against his masculinity, chickened out and made the contribution from the Young Socialist Alliance instead). Muskie ducked in on Oregon and California, scene of early June primaries.
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Rick Perlstein (Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72)
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On balance, I conclude that Nixon’s greatness and his vision for a global political realignment to achieve world peace must be viewed as well as his numerous mistakes.
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Roger Stone (Tricky Dick: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Richard M. Nixon)
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Most importantly, Ally Sloper represents the first major recurring character in comics, and its first superstar. Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday (1884-1923) is “widely acknowledged as the publication that established the [comics] form,”[101] and Sloper himself, as Roger Sabin notes, is the form’s first star, comics’ first character to become a major merchandizing figure. Credit for this is usually given to Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid, but “the Yellow Kid did not appear until 1894.
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Jess Nevins (The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana)
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A Good Start in Financial History You really can’t learn enough financial history. The following, listed in descending order of importance, are landmarks in the field. Edward Chancellor. Devil Take the Hindmost. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999. What manias look like; how to recognize—and hopefully avoid—irrational exuberance. Benjamin Roth. The Great Depression: A Diary. New York: PublicAffairs, 2009. What the bottoms look like; how to keep your courage and your cash up. Roger G. Ibbotson and Gary P. Brinson. Global Investing. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Five hundred years of hard and fiat money, inflation, and security returns in a small, easy-to-read package. Adam Fergusson. When Money Dies. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010; Frederick Taylor. The Downfall of Money. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. What real inflation looks like. Be afraid, very afraid. Benjamin Graham. Security Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. You’re not a pro until you’ve read Graham “in the original”—the first edition, published in 1934. An authentic copy in decent condition will run you at least a grand. Fortunately, McGraw-Hill brought out a facsimile reprint in 1996. Charles Mackay. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Petersfield, U.K.: Harriman House Ltd., 2003. If you were smitten with Devil Take the Hindmost, you’ll love this nineteenth-century look at earlier manias. Sydney Homer and Richard Sylla. A History of Interest Rates, 4th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Loan markets from 35th-century B.C. Sumer to the present.
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William J. Bernstein (Rational Expectations: Asset Allocation for Investing Adults (Investing for Adults Book 4))
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Taylor had an affinity with animals, more than with men - Burton delighted, incidentally, during their erotic vagrancies, in watching her 'become the animal that all men seek in their women.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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It is the case, I think, that when they are 'themselves', celebrities become strangers to themselves, silly and self-conscious.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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We note this slips, those eyes, plus her white hats made from orchid stamens. She's like something from a botanical garden. Uncredited in the title sequence, Taylor, by 1979, was so famous, she didn't require any announcement - she briefly materialises and dematerialises, like a night bloom.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Taylor went to her mother ' and the tears rolled down both our cheeks... I couldn't stop crying. I knew I would cry for days but that didn't matter,' because she enjoyed it really, never felt better in her life. Taylor enjoyed disaster, illness, drunkeness, drugs, violence, lechery, insults and acrimony.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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They have a confrontational style. They weren't refined in their appearance, but coarse. They had resilience, and this is what curbed, or allowed them to survive (or surmount), their recklessness. They didn't much care what others thought of them, of their opinions and judgment. They were capable of courage, and temper. Taylor and Lucy had defiance - and the camera captured this. Nothing about them was relaxing.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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When he laughed (...) it is a derisive, scornful, cruel sort of snickering. His laughter is lashing out. He cannot trifle. On the receiving end of a joke or if somebody is being obviously funny, he looks startled, bemused. He steps aside, as it were. Disengages himself. I, myself, in the past, have always written about, dwelt on, comic genius - but Burton had a tragic sense of things. His element was despair, almost despondency.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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The welsh are supreme at being actors and actresses because our flamboyance is suppressed; it is the guilty secret, which bursts out now and again in lunatic ways, quick and fierce.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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She was never so prostrate she couldn't apply lip gloss in the ambulance.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Roberts was always tormented bu a puritan conscience, which made her ill at ease in Hollywood, mistrustful of success and happiness; the puritan conscience that dictated 'everything I did was wrong.' As she wrote in her own diary, 'Yes I have a sweetness and a warmth and intelligence and talent, but I have also a devastating psychological flaw that is finally crippling me.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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She was meant to be a goddess, after all, and goddesses can't die - Taylor was affronted bu the idea of genuine death, consigning such an event to her film roles.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Though now and again desperate and miserable, she rather luxuriated in her own anguish - and I never feel I pity her. There's too much savagery and pride.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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With Taylor, there's more of a fairy-tale element, as if she's a creature who has only borrowed human shape and form - there's something about her that's elemental, from the forrest floor.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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It was as if she was about to die, but never did. Burton, meanwhile, when he was alive, would be on pins: 'I worried a lot about Elizabeth this morning... and how awful it would be to lose her. I worked myself up to a rare state of misery.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Burton was like a broken down king without a kingdom, fumbling with a chalice, adrift in hotel suites, private yachts, executive jets - and in the end I think I agree with him. He never did Lear - so what? He was Lear.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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They'd entered his imagination, extending into all areas of his life and existence and to put on a costume and move around on a stage or film studio, surrounded by a cast, a crew, an audience doing things and declaiming for effect, striking attitudes and poses 0 he'd be like an animal in captivity, and all this was compromising, standardising.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Shakespeare was Burton's way of looking at the world, its shadows and reflections.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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It was Taylor who showed him another way, her Pop Art gaudiness and smeared pigment contrasting with his Pre-Raphaelite fancy methods where, as it were, one weighed one's words.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Do you mind if we go up on stage? I haven't stood on a stage for twenty-odd years." It was a very moving experience for him, and tears filled his eyes.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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he was heard to say he'd like to be invisible really, observing and recording, 'to be able to do that in absolute anonymity would be very desirable.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Life is contingent, zig-baggy, made up of discordant moments; and though the history and fortunes of Burton and Taylor seemed to come along or accumulate like a Dickens novel in weekly instalment, even with them living their lives as they pleased, much of existence simply passed by, or was soon forgotten - appetite, scraps, events, sub-plots,, which slowed down, speeded up, sank in, or failed to register.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Conventional or traditional biographies are about corpses, reclining figures on tombs.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Taylor said as much, to Warhol's Interview Magazine in November 1976: 'Private? What make you think my life is private?' Public opinion was the pond in which they swam.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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And if biographies are distortions - egregious and artificial - where does that leave biography? Or what I choose to call the biographical fallacy? Apart from there being, obviously, a tombstone at the far end, a summing-up in the papers should you be notable, despite what biographies allege, a life has no predictable shape or stability.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Like Cleopatra, Taylor was her own singular and flamboyant creation, whose own needs were paramount.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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In this book I try to evoke the age of Sixties excess - the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels, the steam yachts and sailing in the azure sea; the mess and splendour of material good; the magnificent bad taste and greed and money smelling like jasmine.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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It was as if he was contemptuous of his talent - his acting is suffused with guilt, with a sense of loss, with the water of life flowing by.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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The fragments remaining, though seemingly distracted, conflicting compressed, had, I felt, vitality, movement - the movement of rocks in an avalanche.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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I am perhaps less interested in Burton and Taylor historically and biographically, than in isolating them culturally, as carnal and fantasy figures who floated about in a world of child stars, faded grandeur, alcoholism, promiscuity and Lassie. If they remain significant, desirable, it is because what I watch and absorb in the end isn't a performance but a personality, a presence. Taylor is subtle and soft, with her perfumes and firs - yet there is something demonic and lethal about her. Burton, in his turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looks as if he is lit by silver moonlight, when perhaps he'd turn into a wolf. His films have the atmosphere of intense dreams - dreams filled with guilt and morbidity.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Michael Sheen once asked Taylor, 'How sweet is the air between the Welsh Valleys and the slopes of Mount Olympus?'; a book about love and hatred and obsessions; men and women and their incongruities; the issues of manhood and narcism; the nature of ravishment and conquest and of suffering and ultimate risk; the fantasises we have about film stars and the fantasies the Burtons had about each other. What did they hope and desire for themselves? Why did they seem incapable of calm or satisfaction?
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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I have a lust for diamonds,' said Taylor, 'that's almost like a disease.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Their erotic relationship - their need too be transported by irresistible powers, which disturb and arouse - had an intensity and force, excitement and fervour.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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Burton's hedonism coexisted with his puritanism, and his improprieties were also penitential - he was always working through his guilt, taking pleasure in it. Words when he spoke them had a lyric potency and plangency, the sounds of coiling and lingering, like a stream amongst pebbles.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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What Burton actually was, was a disappointed romantic, and as he registered his own downfall, his life became intolerable to him.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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The burtons were under a net, shackled by desire; absorbed by each other, yes, by the fantasy and potency and anticipation of each other - but there was also a social and moral trespass, Holy dread, as Taylor knew well enough when she wrote in her memoirs, of her initial meeting with Burton, and its aftermath, 'I think it was a little like damnation to everybody.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)
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As the unreality of Hollywood only made him aware of his agitation and hollowness, he was drawn back sentimentally to his birth place, or tot he idea of his birthplace, and he drank himself to death when he saw only wasted opportunities: 'I loved my silly image as the besotted Welsh genius, dying in his own vomit in the gutter,' he said unconvincingly.
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Roger Lewis (Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor)