WHILE REAGAN was governor, I will never forget his taking time out of his schedule after a television taping to show me—a 15-year-old high school student—how he could instantly arrange his packs of anecdote-filled index cards into a speech tailor-made for almost any audience. I still use a variation of Reagan’s system to construct my own speeches.

Anecdotes’, he concluded, ‘havetheir historic value, if properly tested’ – reflecting both his interest in details and also theneed to ascertain whether they were true (Deutsch, 1905b).

exempla (anecdotes illustrating a moral point)

Niles Niami, the mansion developer who built The One, and described his aesthetic, simply, as “badass”, had floated increasingly desperate plans to avoid auctioning it off, the Los Angeles Times reported, including turning it into an events space for boxing matches and holographic appearances of dead celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, and making a cryptocurrency called “The One Coin” backed by the value of the property.

Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film “Marathon Man.” On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”

I would have seen memory palaces as a simplified version of songlines, but my Indigenous colleague has now pointed out that sometimes songlines are taught before the person goes on Country - that’s how they navigated: teach the songlines and you can then travel knowing where food sources and waterholes are. So my theory is falling down already. But the songline always involves movement (not always dance), song, narrative and a mesh of genres of information.

I was recently reminded of a story about Evelyn Waugh, who had behaved particularly rudely to a young French intellectual at a dinner party. Waugh was asked by the host, Nancy Mitford, how he could act so meanly and yet consider himself a believing and practicing Catholic. “You have no idea,” Waugh is said to have responded, “how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.”

Un aneddoto della vita di Jules Verne narra che lui, da ragazzino, si volesse imbarcare come mozzo su una nave diretta nelle Indie. Bloccato dal padre pronunciò le fatidiche parole “D’ora in poi viaggerò solo con la fantasia!” E così fece.

denunziato come eretico dal suo ospite, fu nel 1592 arrestato dall'Inquisizione e processato.

gli scolari disertavano le sue lezioni e affollavano quelle di Hegel, allora nel pieno della sua fama.

Listerine, for example, started life on the shelf as an antiseptic, sold as both floor cleaner and a treatment for gonorrhoea. But it wasn't a runaway success until it was marketed as a treatment for bad breath. 

scienceWhen the actor Michael J. Fox was in the initial stages of creating his foundation forresearch on Parkinson’s Disease, he came to recognize the negative impact thatcompetition among scientific groups has on the overall progress of research on thedisease. The director of one group actually said to him, ‘‘Well, if you don’t help us,then, at least, don’t help them’’ [1, p. 236]. Such was his introduction to thecompetitive world of U.S. science.