Word: enigma
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...book's name and cover caught my eye simultaneously. V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival was illustrated with a similarly titled painting by Giorgio de Chirico, the Greek-Italian pre-Surrealist. I pored over the book, which describes the Trinidadian Nobel laureate's own coming to terms with living in southern England, a few miles from where I had grown up. Enthused and enthralled, I decided I wanted the painting...
...walked its grid, we were greeted by a phantasmagoric palette of Rubens, Da Vinci and Van Gogh copies. Painting quietly in an alleyway, one young artist seemed to find us rather than vice versa. As Tamara translated, he cast an appreciative eye over a printout of De Chirico's Enigma, and promised a 2-sq.-ft. canvas reproduction, in a fortnight...
...deepest pleasure lies in the enigma of motivation. Its true that Hanssen made a fair amount of money from the Soviets, but that does not seem to be what's driving him. He just goes on living a modest middle-class existence. Nor does he bear any resemblance to certain Cold War-era spies, who served communist ideology out of some sort of (misplaced) idealism. It was rather the opposite with him. Slowly, it steals across you that he was acting out of the desire to prove just how smart he was, how superior he was to his, well, superiors...
...Abraham Lincoln’s craggy face staring out from the cover. But in spite of the photograph’s prominence, the key word in the title of Alan Trachtenberg’s new book is not “Lincoln,” but “enigmas.”Honest Abe figures only slightly in one of the book’s essays, and even then it is not so much Abraham Lincoln as the photographs of him that interest the author. This fascination is typical for Trachtenberg, who is a professor emeritus of English...
...greatest enigma in college basketball is something seemingly too simple: win on the road.Yet in any league, for any team, it is the hardest thing to do.To become a road warrior, gain road fortitude, or excel in any other cliché one can choose is a challenge that brings even the best of programs to its knees.For Harvard, the team has dubbed it “road toughness.” And despite the disappointments of the weekend past, punctuated by its hard-fought 75-63 loss to Penn on Saturday night, the Crimson still believes it can transfer this...