In the delightful memoir All my friends (Putnam, 1989), George Burns explains how Jolson would stop a musical midscene and in Gus's pseudosouthern drawl say: "You know how dis ends. The horse, he wins the race, and the boy gets de girl. Now, you wanna see that, or you wanna hear Jolson sing?" He then sent the cast home and offered a prolonged selection of his hit songs.
J. Kenrick, Musical theatre: a history (2008), 159
'Many people in Aachen consider him [Charlemagne] a saint,' said Stefanie, a willow-haired tour guide in the cathedral. 'They pray to him and they say miracles happened because of him. But the Vatican refuses to accept this because of all the Saxons he killed. As if all the other saints were so pure!'
N. Jubber, Epic continent (2021), 149
Roland makes vague references to Christianity, but he only prays at the very end of his life; and even then he devotes fewer lines to God than to his beloved sword, Durandal. Like the heroes of Germanic and Greek mythology, from Achilles to Beowulf, his true idol worldly status, measured by the blood you shed and the blood shed on your behalf.
...
With its odds and ends of ritual and relics, Rocamadour can feel like a theme park for pious Catholics... and gaze at a gleaming sword impaled in the rock face. That's what I was here for: to feast my eyes on Durandal, the French Excalibur.
N. Jubber, Epic continent (2021), 140
The tramways were the final links attaching Camberwell to the vast, haphazard, intricate structure of London's communications. The whole system worked like some self-regulating clearing house which permitted an almost infinite variety of journeys. It was a system nevertheless whose latent capacity for mass travel was in the 1870s still far greater than its actual contribution to it.
H.J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: a study of the growth of Camberwell (1961), 75
Here's the problem with Mandarin: move an inch outside your speciality, and there is no guarantee that any of the words will mean anything to you. I had been speaking Chinese for twenty years, and was in town to give a lecture on medieval history, but the strange sigils describing arcane translation nightmares, like McFlurry and McNugget, might as well have been Martian.
...
'What's that thing called,' I began wearily, 'which is very big probably the biggest thing that you have, and there are two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, all in a sesame seed bun?'
'Ah,' said the bespectacled youth before me, 'you are referring to the Immense Tyrant Without Compare (ju wu ba).'
At last, a new use for the archaic term for a Bronze Age overlord, now recognised by twenty-first-century Chinese teenagers as the word for a Big Mac.
J. Clements, The Emperor's feast (2021), 194-5
Deng found himself sitting next to Shirley MacLaine ... She was fulsome in praise for some of the benefits of Mao's policies, and told Deng of a story she had heard about a Chinese intellectual who was actually grateful for the Cultural Revolution. Sent into the countryside to grow tomatoes, she said, the man said he had experienced a wonderful object lesson in realism in realism and human life.
'He was lying,' Deng replied.
J. Clements, The Emperor's feast (2021), 186
