Word: twain
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...XRay. Sir Walter Scott, said Mark Twain, did "more real and lasting harm" with his "sham grandeurs" than "any other individual that ever wrote." Today, few Americans suspect how many thousands of native place names are directly or indirectly Sir Walter's. "Poetic" names built around glen, dale, vale, hurst, mere and burn broke out like a rash in the late 1800s; soon they enclosed many cities "like a ring of outer fortifications," protecting them from such vulgarisms as creek, gap, bottom and bluff. "Even if a city-dweller could escape moving to the suburbs [of Larchmont, Glen Cove...
Wartime rookies in the Coldstream Guards are crushed into shape by kipper-complexioned, one-eyed Sergeant Bill Nelson, whose arms are "gnarled as old salami," whose fists protrude "like mallets of black stinkwood," and who sounds off to new recruits like one of Mark Twain's brawny scrappers in Life on the Mississippi...
...Published in 1888, it sold slowly for a year, then suddenly caught on and shortly sold over a million copies. Looking Backward seemed only a sugar-coated romance ; actually, it was propaganda for a Socialist Utopia. Among those who have acknowledged its influence on their thinking have been Mark Twain, William Dean Ho wells, George Bernard Shaw, Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Aristide Briand, Ramsay MacDonald, William Allen White, Eduard Benes. Unlike most Utopian outlines, Looking Backward presented a concrete program for the modern world...
Such was Yalta when the late, great Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his party of Yankee innocents abroad arrived to visit Tsar Alexander II at his summer estate, Livadia. In the same expanse of gardens and palaces, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill had their second meeting. Clemens said of the setting...
...stone palace where President Roosevelt stayed was built in 1911 for the last of the Romanovs. But the smaller of the estate's two palaces, the gardens themselves and the famed Fountain of the Nymph-smuggled from Pompeii in 1834 -are pretty much as they were when Mark Twain saw them, clustered in the shadow of the great Ai-Dagh (Holy Mount...