Hold court?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Hold court?

Asked if he was working as a fruiterer, as he had told the State Parole Authority he would be, he apologised, saying: “I would love to have a coffee with you but it’s part of my parole conditions that I can’t talk to the media. When I get off parole, we can have a coffee.”

- It’s a ‘beautiful’ life for Bill the fruiterer, SMH.com.au, February 12, 2017.

2. It’s been many decades now since historians began to dismantle “Great Man” theories of history, emphasizing their narrowness and artificiality. Histories from below, social history, microhistory: All of these well-established trends have been aimed at making the historical narrative more inclusive, more fine-grained, less elitist. Yet there is still a group of people who tend to be overrepresented in historical writing: namely, writers. “The past is what’s written down,” Jill Lepore writes in her new book Joe Gould’s Teeth. “It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all.”

Lepore has long been interested in gaps in the historical record and in the way some figures inevitably crowd out others. Her first book, The Name of War, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1999, reconstructed a war between New England colonists and Native Americans from the natives’ point of view; she has since written a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister and a “secret history” of Wonder Woman. In a 2001 article in The Journal of American History titled “Historians Who Love Too Much,” she declared that one of her aspirations is to “betray people who have left abundant records in order to resurrect those who did not.” Even when we try to turn away from the powerful and famous in favor of the marginal and obscure, we are limited by the evidence available to us. Some people speak volumes; others are silent. It’s easy to say that history should be about more than great men, but in practice we are often stuck with those who felt themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be great. It takes work to see past them, to read between the lines.