My dear, if I should say your eyes / Are bright as Rigel in the skies; / If I should say your lustrous hair / Is glorious more than high Altair / And that your simple, happy smile / Is of the Mona Lisan style; / Or that your graceful ruby lips / E’en Trojan Helen’s do eclipse; / And tell you, too—not just to please— / You’re fairer than the Naiades; / Said I such things, by ardor fanned, / I do not think you’d understand.

For years after Yeltsin crashed onto the political scene, the Gorbachev-infatuated West was overwhelmingly dismissive. Mr. Colton, a professor of government and director of Russian studies at Harvard and the author of a grand history of the city of Moscow, cops to being one of those early dismissers.

[…] she found (as she believed) a friend; a decent woman as spoke to her about the needle-work as she had been brought up to do, about finding plenty of it fur her, about a lodging fur the night, and making secret inquiration […]

A narrative circulates at Mitchell, Hall about a naive young employee who, in his eagerness to be creative, reinvents the wheel, devoting so many hours reformulating work that has already been done that he drives himself into a nervous breakdown.