TOWARD the end of the millennium, odd, century-straddling parallels occur to the anthology reader.
It starts and finishes in the Middle East, but in between there is a span of some four millenniums (give or take the odd century) and a journey that covers much of the globe.
If every East European nation takes hard-bitten pride in having spent the odd century under a yoke, then Hungary has been bowed beneath these metaphorical implements of tyrannical enslavement so consistently it almost likes it that way.
But if you've been alive for four-odd centuries, you're going to have seen a few things and think, well, is this time better than before?
Former governors of the Bank of England do not, with the odd 19th-century exception, write books – least of all books like The End of Alchemy, whose bibliography starts with Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state under Truman, and finishes with Stefan Zweig, taking in Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Hayek and Arthur Waley on the way.
Where the empty cobbled streets of Cuzco ended, the dirt trail led down out of the mountains past neat villages full of miniature people dressed in psychedelic colors and odd 19th-century civil service uniforms.
Schiller's Elizabeth and Mary are traditionally portrayed by actors as a 16th-century odd couple.
Last year, for example, "The Artist and the Camera," at the Dallas Museum of Art, assembled a group of 19th- and 20th-century odd fellows.
Mukti looked on, appalled, and noticing his expression Busner confided: 'Y'know, you can take the man out of the institution – but after half a century odd, you can't deprive him altogether of the institutional food.' Mukti lifted the dead mouse of his herbal teabag from his mug by its paper tail and regarded it balefully, 'Well,' he said.
According to one version of the tale, when the neighborhood poured out to rubberneck and offer help, they noticed something odd (by 19th century southern elite standards): the woman of the house was trying to save her jewels and furs without the aid of her slaves.
The orchestrion's odd combination of 21st-century technology and 19th-century aesthetics — the contraption harks back to orchestral simulators popular before the advent of recorded music — is sure to fascinate, he said.
