Reverie, by Hubert Denis Etcheverry, c. 1930. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
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Miscellany
In the days after a July 1917 German air raid on London that killed forty civilians, Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born owner of Selfridges department store, took out ads declaring he would award $5,000 of life insurance on behalf of anyone killed by such an attack while shopping at his store. His building, he noted, was made out of concrete.
Had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have changed.
—Blaise Pascal, 1658
