James A. Thomas was the managing director of the British-American Tobacco Company in China from its beginning in 1905 to 1920. Largely through his efforts, BAT--formed as a joint venture of James B.

Half a century ago, the view from the offices of the Union Assurance Company of Canton, on the west bank of the Huangpu River in downtown Shanghai, might have resembled the landscape captured on the Ming Dynasty screen that decorates the west wall of the Thomas Reading Room in Duke's Lilly Library: a pastoral scene, dotted with trees and flowers.

In Beijing they didn’t say SARS at first.

Adorning the walls of his East Campus office are three paintings from the Duke art museum's permanent collection. One, a somber, disfigured nude in dark hues, was painted by a Duke art student in the late Sixties, shortly before his suicide. This is the favorite, the one he asked for; the other two were there already when he moved in 1993 from his earlier perch in the Allen Building.

On a rainy September Tuesday, in the atrium of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the air tingles with celebrity as movie stars, aristocrats, and Nobel Peace Prize laureates take to an understated stage for a press conference. They have come together to mark the publication of a book, Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World.