Word: autocrat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ATATURK, by Lord Kinross. An acute and gripping biography of the mercurial autocrat who, singlehanded, transformed Turkey from a decadent relic of medieval Byzantium into a modern state...
Steel Ahead. It was evident last week that Harold Wilson was certainly an odd sort of socialist, one able to beguile a French autocrat, a German burgher and a millionaire Texan. Actually Wilson is more Methodist than Marxist, and even if he wanted to nationalize everything in sight, he would be hard put to find many sizable industries that the British government does not already have a hand in. It is a fact of British life that after 13 years of Conservative rule, one of every four houses in the country is owned by public authorities, 90% of British students...
...Autocratic Outrages. The liberal Democrats' next target was the once mighty Rules Committee, which must pass on every bill before it goes to a floor vote. Until 1961 Virginia's conservative Democrat Howard ("Judge") Smith had almost dictatorial powers, because of a coalition with Republicans. Smith's strength was dissipated in 1961 when John Kennedy and Speaker Rayburn rammed through a change in committee membership. But Lyndon's lieutenants in Congress wanted to take no chances of any kind, and the caucus approved new rules that would give Speaker McCormack broad powers to release any bill...
...same tense, split-second discipline that he knew from racing for a couple of hours around three buoys in Long Island Sound. The wonder is that Captain Bligh Shields had no mutiny. But by then he had won, along with his international championships, the right to be the autocrat of the cockpit. Nobody who questions a Shields order is ever allowed on a Shields boat again...
This time around, Mba took out autocrat insurance. His bullyboys kidnaped an estimated 1,000 opposition supporters, dumped them hundreds of miles deep in the bush on election day. Even at that, anti-Mba candidates captured 53% of the popular vote. But thanks to convenient gerrymander and the 1,500 French settler votes that went almost unanimously to Mba in Libreville, his Bloc Démocratique Gabonais Party won 31 of the National Assembly's 47 seats. Immediately, a call for a general strike went up, and angry youths began gathering in Libreville's shady, bungalow-lined streets...