A breathless seven hundred and fifty pages, the unfinished manuscript nominally concerns a young velvet-suited nobleman "whose pallor bespoke a strange destiny": to redeem his family's Royalist past, he must serve as a common sailor on a corsair.
But the Aeneid is the product of an unimaginably different time from the archaic Greek texts: it is urban, self-conscious, and invested in an attempt to forge a poetic identity for Rome, a cultural framing for the strange destiny of this city, once just another insignificant town straddling a handful of hilltops and a marsh in Latium.
When the late Graham Greene's The Comedians was published, the book's description read, "Set in Haiti, amid an atmosphere of brutal force and terror-ridden love, three desperate people work out their strange destinies".
But it soon becomes clear, once he has learned to get over himself, that Strange's destiny is far greater than returning to boring old surgery.
Like a moth to a flame, Quell slips further from view, gliding gracefully toward the dock, and, in the distance, hops with a graceful leap over the railing and into his strange new destiny.
Mr Chaudhry calls this a "strange twist of destiny", but is poised to become a dominant figure in the new regime.Fiji's most recent coup, according to the commander, is intended to "clean up" corruption and establish good governance.
We came to share a strange sense of common destiny and gallows humor".
He is kind, funny and inspiring to other actors, and reverential about the work, having had a strange sense of hillbilly destiny about it ever since his mother told him not to worry, he's made it, one day he would work with Burt Reynolds.
At the end of a discussion of James's great story "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903), which is about a man who spends his life convinced that some "rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible" destiny awaits him, only to realize that he's missed what life has had to offer while he's been waiting, Toibin argues that the story "becomes much darker when you know about James's life...
Having seen her perform the Strange Lady in Shaw's Man of Destiny, I promptly cast her as a 60-something dotty old spinster in A Thief in Time (needs must when budgets are limited).
"I don't believe in fate or destiny, but I did feel a strange sense of kismet, which was probably more of just the right place at the right time.
