The visit had been suggested by the architect Walter Gropius, whose disciple Benjamin Thompson was designing a modernist house for her in Oyster Bay, on Long Island.
I open a volume of the "Universal History," in the prestigious "Pléiade" series: in the chapter called "The Slavic World," the great Czech theologian Jan Hus is irremediably separated from the Englishman John Wycliffe (whose disciple Hus was) and from the German Martin Luther (who saw Hus as his teacher and precursor).
Comte was influenced specifically by the Enlightenment Encyclopaedists (such as Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, and others) and, especially in his social thinking, was decisively influenced by the founder of French socialism, Claude-Henri, comte de Saint-Simon, whose disciple he had been in his early years and from whom the very designation positivism stems.
He was also the godfather of American "method" acting, whose disciples ranged from Marlon Brando to Marilyn Monroe.
And like Bloom he is a magnetic teacher, a demanding and dogmatic professor whose disciples are as passionate as his detractors.
Therein lies the allure of the irrational Mr. Market, a character invented in the 1930s by the father of value investing, Benjamin Graham (whose disciples include Warren E. Buffett).
The real Jesus of Nazareth, he argued, was a political revolutionary who died disappointed, and whose disciples invented a resurrection — and with it, a religion — to make sense of his failure.
The group's Svengali, Teacher Chen Jackson Ningg, opaque but vaguely benign), whose disciples view airplanes overhead as celestial visitations, wears a ring that he claims gives him a direct line to higher powers.
After all, he was one of the original architects of New Labour, whose disciples are now so often censured for their late-90s "love affair" with the City and light-touch regulation.
Jailed by the British raj, Savarkar is remembered both as a freedom fighter and as the founding father of Hindu nationalism, one of whose disciples in 1948 assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.Last month, a Congress minister, Mani Shankar Aiyer, ruled that a quotation from him should be expunged from a memorial at the prison in the Andaman islands where he was detained.
Mr. Ahmadinejad's supporters include most of the intelligence apparatus, part of the Revolutionary Guards high command and hard-line clerics and their followers, led by Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, an ultra-reactionary whose disciples play important roles in the Ahmadinejad administration and in the judiciary.
