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Recent Examples of cottarIn 1846 and 1847, potatoes, the subsistence crop of the cottar subtenants who composed nearly half the population on some Hebridean estates, failed almost entirely.—Hugh Raffles, The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct. 2020
In the early nineteenth century, after Egyptian peasants happened upon ancient fragments, archaeologists began to look in such places for pieces of manuscript, which could vary in size from a few letters to a slice of text.
—
Madeleine Schwartz,
The New York Review of Books,
6 June 2026
That moniker comes from a violent 1967 peasant uprising against oppressive landlords in Naxalbari, a village in the shadow of the Himalayan foothills in northeast India.
Soon there was an altercation at the front desk, when a Haitian upbraided the American peons about not getting her free stuff fast enough.
—
Howie Carr,
Boston Herald,
8 Oct. 2025
Not only does the peon and con man Tom end up refashioning himself as the rich and carefree Dickie, but Highsmith’s novel itself was a retelling of Henry James’s The Ambassadors.