Word: hadrian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...basic statutes of law and justice for the Western world, their successors in the modern nation of Italy are caught in as tangled and Kafkaesque a legal code as besets any country. Wrestling with precedents that go back to the Twelve Tables of 450 B.C., to the Caesars and Hadrian and Justinian, plagued by remnants of the Code Napoleon and the harsh Fascist glorifications of police and state, baffled judges let dockets pile up. Cases drag on, and prisons overflow with prisoners still awaiting trial. The solution: a periodic amnesty...
Furthermore, although it enabled us to have the "Boston tea party, the revolution, and the DAR," if it were dried up, we could have the Henley races on the East River from the U.N. to Wall St., and could juxtapose Hadrian's wall and the Mason-Dixon Line...
British Novelist Johnson parodies Rolfe to perfection in all his attributes save one; the mad genius that cut Hadrian the Seventh into one of the diamonds of modern fiction. But she tells her tale waspishly and well, and transports to the canals of Bruges much of the sacred luster and glory that Frederick Rolfe adored in Venice...
...studied for the priesthood but was expelled from his seminary in Rome. For the rest, he was a weirdly gifted writer, schoolmaster, painter, photographer, workhouse inmate, homosexual, paranoiac, and perhaps the most merciless autobiographer ever to snarl at his own image. In his famed, partly autobiographical novel, Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe created a fantasy in which the College of Cardinals chooses as Pope an expelled English novice (like himself) who reforms the church and the world, and dies a martyr. In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Rolfe told the truth, little less fantastic, about his years...
...maintain that a single African ancestor, however remote, makes a man Negro. About 60 generations have passed since the heyday of the Roman Empire; so an American of European ancestry is descended from 2 60 (1,152,921,504,606,846,976) ancestors at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. This immense figure is not to be taken literally, but it surely means that people with ancestors who lived in the Roman Empire, including England and part of Germany, are descended from a broad cut of the empire's population...