Word: half
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...widowed mother Hoelun chased away from their tribe with her brood, including her eldest, nine-year-old Temujin. The outcasts ate field mice and marmots even as they fought off thieves out for their horses, the most precious of nomad property. Bitterness cultivated a heart of iron. After a half-brother grabbed a fish he had hooked, Temujin would kill the offending sibling in a hail of arrows. He never showed remorse. His mother was furious at the waste of a potential soldier in the revenge she envisioned. "We have no one to fight with us," she hectored, "except...
...Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The Franks, as they were called, then occupied four militarily aggressive states in the Holy Land. The great Syrian leader Nur al-Din predicted that expelling the invaders would require a holy war of the sort that had propelled Islam's first great wave half a millennium earlier, but given the treacherous regional crosscurrents, such a united front seemed unlikely...
...rigorous education, tutored by distinguished scholars in the classics, history, philosophy, languages and theology. She was serious and quick witted. "Her mind has no womanly weakness," said her teacher Roger Ascham, but she equally loved music, dancing and gaiety. During the bloody reigns of her Protestant half brother and zealously Catholic half sister, Elizabeth needed all her poise, discipline and political acumen just to survive...
This totemic reduction of nature--the streamlining of a bird's body, the swish of its flight--was a prediction of the technological world to come in the second half of the century. RUNNERS-UP Guitar by Pablo Picasso; The Chariot by Alberto Giacometti...
...Marco Polo described huge ships in Chinese seaports with separate watertight bulkheads. Without the compartments, ships with pierced hulls would sink. A half-century would pass before Western naval engineers adopted the technology...