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Category Archives: Famous Couples

Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel Hubbard

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

IN MARCH 1876, after more than a year of sleeplessness, harried experimentation and a neck and neck race with a competitor, Alexander Graham Bell filed the U.S. patent for the first working model of the telephone. It was the culmination of intense and varied interest by three generations of Bells in projection of the human [...]

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Callas and Onassis

Monday, November 23, 2009

 
Maria Callas, the opera diva who died in 1977, was one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. More than any other prima donna or actress, she brought to modern audiences the power and electricity of Ancient Greek drama. Opera-goers spoke of being frightened or confused when they first saw her perform.
Callas, also one of the most beautiful and well-dressed women of the century, was not wise [...]

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Lev and Sofya Tolstoy

Monday, September 21, 2009

 
As part of my ongoing look at Famous Couples,  I examine the extraordinarily fertile and volatile marriage of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya Andreyevna. In his final decades, Tolstoy largely abandoned his literary work and became a preacher of universal love and forgiveness. This prophet of peace, who had produced the greatest novel about marriage ever written, also fashioned a domestic hell [...]

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Clementine and Winston

Sunday, August 2, 2009

 
                                                                                                             

 
As part of my ongoing series on Famous Couples, I take a backward glance at the marriage of Winston and Clementine Churchill.
 
 

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Adam and Eve

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart. No, no! I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
                                                          Paradise Lost (Book IX, 908-916) 
All famous couples are better [...]

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Famous Couples: An Introduction

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

I have a philosopher friend who has his own theory of gossip. He considers gossip a form of philosophizing.
To gossip about others is to engage in a type of necessary rational analysis. This is conducive to social order as it enables people to act with reason and forethought.
It’s an interesting argument, but I disagree, holding the [...]

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