Word: agee
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Steinsaltz's audacity was such that at age 27 he decided to create a modern Talmud. "It was a kind of hubris," he admits. Standard editions are virtually unreadable for nonexperts partly because the Hebrew is printed without vowel notations or punctuation. And the work abounds with obscurities. Two commentaries are customarily printed alongside the text to assist understanding, but they raise further questions because they are centuries...
...more. "You can't flatter yourself in the belief that you can leverage the world from the perimeter of Ellsworth, Me.," he says. "But I enjoy rural life a lot better than I do big cities. I'm at home in this environment." Happiness, he says, is an old age shared with Ben Franklin's three faithful friends: "an old wife, an old dog and ready money...
...just another typical eccentric. In his 80s the eminent country squire was to be seen clambering around the upper branches of an oak tree with what was aptly described as the agility of an "adolescent gorilla." The beloved 27th lord of Walton Hall also devoted his distinguished old age to scratching the back part of his head with his right big toe. Such displays of animal high spirits were not, however, confined to the gentleman's later years. When young, Waterton made four separate trips to South America, where he sought the wourali poison (a cure, he was convinced...
...Wordsworth labeled him "the marvellous boy," and Samuel Johnson burbled, "It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." Not all the appraisal was so rhapsodic. Horace Walpole called Chatterton "an instance that a complete genius and a complete rogue can be formed before a man is of age." Genius because Chatterton's verses were so prodigious, rogue because the young poet once wrote in an archaic style, artificially aged the paper, then claimed to have discovered the works of a bogus 15th century monk...
Raised in a middle-class Catholic family in a Philadelphia suburb, Haig was energetic and determined even as a boy, with his sights set on being a soldier. His older sister Regina recalls young Alec at age four, in a little cap, blowing his toy bugle until his lips were raw and swollen. His father, a lawyer, died when Alec was ten, and his mother raised three children alone, aided financially by a prosperous uncle. Haig had his heart set on West Point, but had to apply twice and use his uncle's political connections to get in. Haig...