Word: basilisk
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...publication of the first English translation of The Book of Imaginary Beings. An alphabetically arranged, cross-cultural bestiary of both famous and faintly known monsters and apparitions, Beings is a spin-off from Borges' vast scholarship. The reader is invited to consider such symbolic creatures as the Basilisk, a remote cousin of Medusa, which kills with its stare. Closer to home is the Pennsylvania Squonk, which dissolves in its own tears when captured. There is also that symbol of incongruity-or sheer perversity -the Hippogriff. It is half horse and half griffon. But that is only half...
...12th centuries, the frescoes reveal an impressive command of technique-particularly for a place so remote. The style of the Nubian monks who painted them seems to have evolved from the naive manner of Egypt's Copts into more severe stylization. An unidentified deacon with basilisk eyes and a mandarin mustache shows the ability of the Nobatian artist to transform a standard Coptic portrait with a sparsity of line more Byzantine than that of the Byzantines...
...youth, Merkin is tempted by the Devil (Milton Berle). From then on, girls fall in line beside his bed. From time to time Merkin is visited by Death (George Jessel) who gazes at Merkin with basilisk eyes and bleats standup jokes that are as dead as vaudeville. Eventually, even he sighs, "I think I should warn you I'm getting new material...
...find a crack in the Sino-Soviet union any more than you will find one in a duck's egg," said Red Chi nese Foreign Minister Chen Yi last July. Scarcely five months later, the duck's egg was cracked wide open. Hatched was an ugly little basilisk, confronting Moscow with a threat to its supremacy far graver than Yugoslavia's defection in 1948. The Soviet Union has the political muscle to keep most of the world's 81 Communist parties in line, and superior economic resources to offer poor nations willing to boost themselves...
...other words, for the Tory radicals who managed to rout the opposition to Britain's entry into the Common Market, Brighton was a strangely unsatisfactory victory. Progressives who wanted reassurance that they were at last in charge never got it from the delegates. Nor, if they looked to their basilisk Prime Minister and his cryptic Cabinet changes, could they find it there either...