Word: obscurest
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...dawn of the papacy, Kelly repeatedly confesses, is too shadowy for even the most intrepid scholar. Of St. Evaristus (c.100-c.109), for example, he says, "Nothing is in fact reliably known about him." St. Felix I (269-74) "is one of the obscurest Popes, even his dates being conjectural." Then there was Pope Joan, whose entire existence is conjectural. Kelly dutifully traces the oftretold legend of a disguised woman Pope (who was found out when she gave birth while trying to mount a horse) to a 13th century work called the Universal Chronicle of Metz. The only Pope who never existed...
...fable, is a South African of unspecified color. A gardener in a Cape Town public park, he has a harelip and a reputation for feeblemindedness that mask his true nature: he is a man as meek and lowly in heart as a latter-day Messiah. Coetzee calls him "the obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy." As his life and times unfold, it becomes clear that his prodigiousness lies in his ability to continue to celebrate life in the midst of the most malignant chaos...
...author refers to his own eventful Nigeria trip in a rather hurried epilogue, but he leaves the reader hungry for news of the interior, for reports on the nation that survived its predators. "The obscurest epoch is today," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strong Brown God proves it. Old Africa stands revealed; current Nigeria apparently remains terra incognita...
...refused "pecuniary reward" for his services to the young country fetched $37,000 in 1973, an alltime record for a presidential letter. The highest price ever bid for a letter may be $51,000, the sum paid in 1927 for a routine communication by Button Gwinnett, one of the obscurest signers of the Declaration, whose rare autograph helped fuel the bidding at last week's auction...
...small drop from one step to the next makes descending difficult. Distinguished professors whose names appear in even the obscurest libraries manage it best. Wearing rounded hats which have been out of shape as long as out of style, they move their legs carefully and slowly. As foot touches step, however, they seem to lose control and a slight jerk moves up the whole body. Teiresias must have moved like this. Inside Widener these men have favorite chairs from which to watch favorite books. When they walk out the latticed door they are not so much leaving the Library...