Word: mens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Elizabeth spent a lifetime contending with the issue of marriage and royal heirs and the challenges raised by men who would steal her scepter. Marriage is what 16th century women were for, and Queens needed heirs. She engaged in the most manipulative, interminable courtships, driven not by love but by politics--though she was tirelessly fond of suitors. Leading a weak country in need of foreign alliances, she brilliantly played the diplomatic marriage game: at one time she kept a French royal dangling farcically for nearly 10 years. Always she concluded that the perils of matrimony exceeded the benefits...
...name, Newton grew into a touchy, passionately focused introvert who could go without sleep for days and live on bread and wine, and, at an astonishingly precocious age, absorbed everything important that was known to science up to that time (the works of Aristotle and, after that, the new men who superseded him: Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes and Galileo, who died in 1642, the year Newton was born). Riding on the shoulders of giants--and correcting the giants where they went wrong--Newton began assembling and perfecting the Newtonian universe, a miraculously predictable and rational clockwork creation held together...
...onslaught is unfair. But even ardent Jeffersonians admit that the man was an insoluble puzzle. The contradictions in his character and his ideas could be breathtaking. That the author of the Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal") not only owned and worked slaves at Monticello but also may have kept one of them, Sally Hemings, as a mistress--allegedly fathering children with her but never freeing her or them--was merely the most dramatic of his inconsistencies...
...impenetrable enamels of his character--formulated, in the Declaration of Independence, the founding aspiration of America and what is still its best self, an ideal that retains its motive force precisely because it is unfulfilled and maybe unfulfillable: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...There?s a feeling in New Delhi that Pakistan played a tremendous role in pressuring the Taliban to not allow a commando raid," says Rahman. "Indian commandos were waiting at the airport in Kandahar to storm the plane, but after Pakistan intervened, the Taliban suddenly surrounded the plane with men and armored vehicles and forbade an Indian attack." As the hijackers left Kandahar airport accompanied by the prisoners whose release they'd won, the Taliban promised India that they wouldn't be given asylum, and would have to leave Afghanistan within 10 hours. Then again, the Taliban periodically say Osama...