Word: axman
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...with 104 of Britain's top prison officials at the Civil Defense Staff College in Berkshire, an unexpected phone call came for Governor Peter Jones of Dartmoor prison. As his colleagues stood by with mouths agape, Jones heard the news that his toughest criminal, the so-called "mad axman of Broadmoor," was at that very moment legging it for freedom. Frank Mitchell, 37, a jail bully who once attacked an elderly couple with an ax, had simply walked away from a work party, darted across the moor and disappeared into...
...skill that Cheever and Lee share, and it reached a danger point on one neighborly occasion at the Lee place, when the two held a woodcutting contest after a fine lunch, Lee with an ax and Cheever with a chain saw. In the heat of the competition, the axman came perilously close to clipping the sawman...
Nabokov's ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...time, there are few sharper antagonists in the House than Louisiana Democrat Otto Passman and Minnesota Republican Walter Judd-Passman passionately against, Judd dourly for. Louisiana's Passman, 59, onetime refrigerator distributor and World War II Navy materiel and procurement officer, seven-term Congressman and Appropriations Committee axman, is an acknowledged expert who knows how to find every foreign-aid dollar in every foreign-aid pipeline and how to take maximum debating advantage thereof. Minnesota's Dr. Judd. 60, onetime medical missionary in China, is a nine-term Congressman and Foreign Affairs Committee veteran who just as expertly...
...appropriation, despite the Navy's agonized pleas that it would mean a reduction of 82,000 men below authorized strength. But the cuts did not come easy. The truth was that Harry Truman had made most of the easy ones himself in his budget message. But chief G.O.P. axman John Taber strove manfully...