The dog was a rescue with some behavior issues.

I have written about Sostratus elsewhere, describing his bulk and enormous strength; how he lived in the open air on Parnassus, slept rough, ate what the mountain provided, and performed deeds which matched his name—killing robbers, and making roads through unbroken country and bridges over impassable places.

[Leon] Trotsky's vanity, unlike [Joseph] Stalin's, was, practically speaking, frivolous. There was something more histrionic about it. He had shown himself no less ruthless than Stalin. Indeed, at the time of the Civil War, he had ordered executions on a greater scale than Stalin or anyone else.

[Susan] Sontag then pauses for the space of a paragraph to deliver a swift verbal kick at American fiction for its technical unadventurousness, its lack of an avant-garde, and its tendency to interpretive borborygm.