Ever known a really really smart person who—wait a minute, when I say really really smart I don’t necessarily mean school-smart, or the sort of person who likes to tell you what a high IQ he or she has, or somebody who made junior-year Phi Beta Kappa, or somebody who’s fond of quoting indecipherable French […]
Crowded amongst the junk on my shelves are two books that are virtually worthless but difficult to throw out. One is a printout from the online Project Gutenberg edition of Madame Bovary, cleverly formatted (by me) to fill each page with nearly a thousand words. The other is Richard Leakey’s The Origins of Mankind, […]
While crossing the plains of Anatolia at the head of the Crusaders, Farthingale was ambushed (March 2, 1098) by “a large mob of uncertain origin” who tortured him cruelly for three days until he died, a scarce few moments before the arrival of a rescue expedition.