Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.
Charles IV and His Family, by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, 1800. Prado Museum, Madrid.
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Miscellany
William and Henry James’ younger brothers, Robertson and Garth Wilkinson, were both wounded during the Civil War—they enlisted in the second and first black regiments at the ages of seventeen and sixteen, respectively. When the fifth sibling, Alice, who suffered from various psychological ailments during her life, died in 1892, Henry cabled William the news. William responded, “I telegraphed you this am to make sure the death was not merely apparent, because her neurotic temperament and chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance tricks to play themselves upon.”
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
—Pope John Paul II, 1986Lapham’sDaily
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Roundtable
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