Twenty-five years had passed since a single horse, Citation, had won all three races, and the public thrilled to the prospect of a new superhorse.
For astronomy 1994 was a particularly exciting year as astronomers and the general public thrilled to one of the most dramatic solar system encounters in memory, the crash of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into the atmosphere of the giant planet Jupiter.
Andrew Bolton, the Met curator who conceived and organized the exhibition, found the public response thrilling, and a little tragic.
In L'Assommoir, the French public were thrilled to find characters who were ruled by their bodies and by the most basic of human instincts; they swore, used the slang of the streets, and had no time for moralising or philosophy.
The public was thrilled by it too: among the hundreds of letters Clark received were several from would-be suicides who wrote that he had given them a reason for going on (they made him weep).
The French public was thrilled by Wilbur's feats and flocked to the field by the thousands, and the Wright brothers instantly became world-famous.
Drawing on the exploits of Edwin Boyd, a Canadian World War II veteran who became that country's most infamous bank robber, this unusually cerebral crime movie chooses psychic pain over public-enemy thrills.
But we did experience, on a popular, public scale, the thrill of the avant garde.
He mounted plays with enough credibility to draw serious theatregoers, as he appealed to the general public's guilty thrill at seeing stars of a certain pedigree join the footlight parade.
