Word: noblemen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Years' War and the Black Death. The church itself was ill, increasingly corrupt and at one point contested by three papal claimants. Families were warped or ripped to shreds, with élites suffering a particular crisis of affection: to avoid having many children who would then divide their estates, noblemen waited until they were quite old before taking young wives and producing much younger sons. "Now," asks Chorpenning of St. Joseph's University, "what does that sound like...
...huge that it's being released in six-month intervals, Matrix-style: Quicksilver drops in September, The Confusion in April 2004 and The System of the World in October 2004. But you'll wish it were longer. Its scope is galactically vast and encompasses the lives of noblemen, vagabonds and, above all, thinkers. Amid the still smoking aftermath of the Fire of London, the likes of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz (both major characters) are laying the foundations of modern science by hand, equation by equation. Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear...
...16th century, the fiery invader Babur swooped down from present-day Afghanistan to begin his conquest of Hindu India, which started three centuries of foreign rule known as the Mogul period. In 1528, one of his noblemen built a mosque in Ayodhya. History suggests the Muslim invaders dismantled a Hindu temple to do so. That's the building and the site that is provenance of the current conflict: some Hindus say the temple, and then the mosque, sat on the actual birthplace of Rama. For a century-and-a-half, Hindus and Muslims squabbled over the mosque. For Hindus, reclaiming...
...every dispassionate contest pitting nature's noblemen against each other, there is, or ought to be, one in which a festering resentment sends a sick thrill through the arena. Why get mad? Because your rival got stupidly lucky. Because your rival took more effective drugs than you did. Because some friends of your rival clubbed you on the knee a month before the big skate. And maybe the real or imagined slight goads the grudging one to greatness. Revenge spurs nearly every movie plot; why shouldn't it juice the adrenaline that an athlete needs to excel...
...professor who is writing books about Shakespeare and De Vere: "The Earl of Oxford was perhaps the most egotistical and self-serving person of his day in England. It would have been out of character for him to write the plays and then keep authorship a secret. Many Elizabethan noblemen wrote and published...