Allusions/references To Actual History, Geography and Current Science
The Mediterranean Caper is different from most novels in the pantheon of the Pitt thrillers in that it does not start with a prologue set in the past. However, a number of true life people and events are mentioned during the course of the novel. These would include the spy Mata Hari, the ghost ships Mary Celeste and Flying Dutchman, and a variety of Nazi war criminals including Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring. A reference is also made to the gruesome keelhauling of a sailor on HMS Confident in 1786
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Famous quotes containing the words actual, geography, current and/or science:
“As our actual present world ... shows itself more clearly—our world of an aristocracy materialised and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal—we shall turn our eyes again, and to more purpose, upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Without the Empire we should be tossed like a cork in the cross current of world politics. It is at once our sword and our shield.”
—William Morris Hughes (1864–1952)
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)