Word: great
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Indeed, if you believe, as I do, that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the kind of global brain now taking shape has been in the cards not just since the Stone Age but since the primordial ooze; it has been, in some sense, life's destiny...
...Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually the same moment, his great rival Picasso creates his equally masterly Cubist collage Still-Life with Chair Caning and Guitar, which reverses the centuries-old traditions of sculpture, focusing the spectator's eye not on the final effect but on the process and materials by which it is obtained...
...architecture's streamlining ways. Or in the ability of books and magazines more and more perfectly to replicate artistic icons past and present. Or in the capacity of the movies to create their own time and space, independent of observed reality. We must imagine him, instead, mourning with the great critic Walter Benjamin the destruction of the artwork's "aura" or magic, deriving from its uniqueness, its firm roots in a specific historical place...
...contemporaries advise us, "great in body...but not ungainly." He had a harsh voice, but his speech was always appropriate. His chroniclers lauded his ability to "appraise the true significance of events" and make good "the fickle promises of fortune." They also remarked that he was "too relentless to care though all might hate him." William the Conqueror was a man--or, more important, a monarch...
When Dante Alighieri compiled his great medieval Who's Who of heroes and villains, the Divine Comedy, the highest a non-Christian could climb was Limbo. Ancient pagans had to be virtuous indeed to warrant inclusion: the residents included Homer, Caesar, Plato and Dante's guide, Vergil. But perhaps the most surprising entry in Dante's catalog of "great-hearted souls" was a figure "solitary, set apart...