Newsmen gathered like sharks in New York, expecting a Soviet dupe, a hick or a bighead.
In his autobiography "Minding the Store" Mr Marcus gives the impression that he was not all that keen to settle down in a hick town after having been given a glimpse of a wider world of books and ideas at Harvard.
Yet beneath his hick accent dwelt what Robert Caro has described as the "master of the Senate"; one of the most adroit politicians and gifted wielders of power in American history.Although he will be remembered both for his triumphant successes and monumental failures, one lesson from LBJ's career is to judge someone by their accent at your peril.
How on earth were such folk outsmarted by a provincial hick best known for its Ski-Doos and Sea-Doos?The answer has much to do with Bombardier's 59-year-old boss, Laurent Beaudoin, whose family owns more than 60% of the firm's voting shares.
Odell Deefus ("Isn't that a nigger name?" is a recurrent refrain) is a Midwestern hick whose dorky, good-natured prose is scattered with malapropisms like "premedicated murder".When his car breaks down en route to enlisting in the army, Odell wanders fatefully into just the wrong house for a glass of water.
The Killer Inside Me (1952) is admired as a chilling depiction of a criminally warped mind; its narrator, a small-town deputy, pretends to be an agreeable hick but is actually a calculating madman who, like most Thompson narrators, speaks directly and colloquially to the reader.
A couple of bands have dropped out – the wonderful brawling punk outfit 6ft Hick; the free-form gypsy-ska-whatever band the Mouldy Lovers (Brisbane's very own Gogol Bordello) – but these withdrawals are the exception, not the rule (this being the state, remember, where a storm of protest followed Campbell Newman's decision to axe the Queensland Premier's literary awards in 2012).
When he heard, somewhat surprisingly, that more Americans visit art exhibitions than sports events, it became the first casino to house an art collection Mr Wynn's own, valued at $300m.In this section A fragile superpower Hangings in the wild west Hick or Hickey?
He derides the conformism of the art scene, and chides the curators of big international art shows for their "repression" of alternative styles.In this section A fragile superpower Hangings in the wild west Hick or Hickey?
What mattered was to preserve the monarchy at all costs.In this section A fragile superpower Hangings in the wild west Hick or Hickey?
In his 18th western novel, Loren Estleman plumbs the question of what might attract a thoughtful carpenter fresh from the horrors of the American civil war to such a grisly occupation.In this section A fragile superpower Hangings in the wild west Hick or Hickey?
