Suppose that we agreed to allow almost the entire accessible universe to be converted into hedonium—everything except a small preserve, say the Milky Way, which would be set aside to accommodate our own needs.

At the far end of the houses the head gardener stood waiting for his mistress, and he gave her strips of bass to tie up her nosegay. This she did slowly and laboriously, with knuckly old fingers that shook.

Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent, occupied the room next to mine at the Hyatt House and she was always back by midnight, reciting a final sixty-second radio spot into her Sony or absorbing one last press release before getting a good night’s sleep.

The historian Movses Khorenatsi (an Armenian source from the fifth century AD according to some, and the eighth century AD, according to others) indicated that the province of Utik (along with Artsakh with which it was contiguous on the south) was part of the Armenian kingdom of the Ervandunis (or Orontids) between the fourth to second centuries BC.