Word: emperor
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When Father Matteo Ricci and his fellow Jesuit missionaries visited Beijing in 1601, they brought two clocks of Italian design as gifts for the Emperor Wan Li. The larger of the two astounded his courtiers, Ricci later wrote, because it was "a work the like of which had never been seen, nor heard in Chinese history...
...fact, as historian Daniel J. Boorstin recounted in The Discoverers, 500 years earlier a civil servant named Su Sung had built a remarkably accurate astronomical clock for his Emperor. But when a new ruler was crowned in 1094, officials, according to custom, decreed that his predecessor's calendar had been faulty. Su Sung's 30-ft.-tall "heavenly clockwork" was abandoned. By the 17th century, it was a legend known to only a few scholars...
Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature Gregory Nagy, for example, lists movies like "Apocalypse Now" and "The Last Emperor" in his core course called "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization...
Isaacson's judgments are generally sound, but like other Nixon and Kissinger biographers he is driven to take sides between the two men. He compares Kissinger with Metternich and Nixon with the wily diplomat's slow-witted superior, Austrian Emperor Francis I, but it was Nixon who persuaded Kissinger to encourage West Germany's overtures to East Germany and who initiated the opening to China. Clearly the two men had similar conceptual strengths and personal weaknesses...
...even as the stars of the U.S. basketball team were in the real Monaco, driving the lane. Their performances were eagerly anticipated. Along the main promenade of town, the tree-lined Ramblas, sidewalk artists had already added Magic Johnson's face to the standard repertoire of Marilyn Monroe and Emperor Hirohito, and copies of Magic's biography were piling up next to canine pianists, peep shows and Ecuadorian panpipers...