Word: blackmailed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Starting as a hill town cobbler's son, Aretino became the most powerful and popular writer in Europe, was perhaps the greatest and certainly the dirtiest master of low vernacular prior to Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Through blackmail, stark flattery, incredible effrontery, and a genius for spotlighting weakness wittily, he forced most of the greatest men of his time to pay his way and to acknowledge him as equal. His great friend Titian described him as "a condottiere (gangster boss) of literature." Biographer Chubb compares his fame to that of Byron, his influence to that of Voltaire...
This week in Manhattan the committee issued a dismally illustrated "Preliminary Report." It was promptly denounced by Secretary Evan Just of the Tri-State Zinc & Lead Ore Producers Association as "damned blackmail." The report contains no harrowing Gauley Bridge tales of mass burials and walking skeletons. It offers only Government statistics, a short medical treatise on silicosis, eyewitness accounts of Tri-State life. What distinguishes the committee's report from most of the 50-odd other silicosis reports which have come out in the last 20 years is the fact that it treats silicosis not as a disease...
...William Jowitt, ace lawyer for Lord Rothermere, summed up by observing that not only was the Princess' story that she had been promised $20,000 yearly for life untrue, "but if it were true it could only be true on the basis that this lady was flirting with blackmail...
...Harvard Faculty might soon provide an opening for the Dies wedge, one radical on a magazine grounds for an expose. Mr. Dies has become past-master of an art on which all strong-men depend. Rather than investigating, he is condemning. Newspapers have become for him an instrument of blackmail--a Roman Forum from which he can read his list of proscription...
...with jail. Without batting a basilisk eye or ruffling a hair over his sinister profile, Swindler Paul explains to them that he forged the securities they hold for his prior loans; if they do not lend him 100,000,000 francs more, he will ruin them. This bit of blackmail lands Paul in Devil's Island. To Rio de Janeiro promptly dash Paul's dog-faithful bodyguard Dirk (rough-and-humble Victor McLaglen) to tend bar, Paul's lissome wife Irene (Sigrid Gurie) to resume her career as a cabaret songster, both to plot Paul...