Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...landmark literary biography James Joyce (1959). In his numerous books and essays he displayed an acute, doctrine-free sensitivity to the many ways that writers such as Yeats, Beckett, Eliot and Auden translate experience into art. In Wilde, Ellmann confronted a somewhat different challenge: an author whose most complex, illustrious accomplishment was the style and content of his own life...
...deserve being caught and crushed in a murderous struggle between Bosie and his lunatic father. "The impression that has been given of Queensberry is that he was a simple brute," Ellmann writes, and adds, sounding a little like his subject: "In fact he was a complex one." The marquess, mad at Wilde and the world, threw out insults that practically begged for a libel suit. Wilde unwisely started one, lost and as a result was tried for sodomy and indecent behavior; convicted of the lesser charge, he served two years at hard labor...
NIXON: THE EDUCATION OF A POLITICIAN 1913-1962 by Stephen E. Ambrose. The first of a two-volume biography of the most complex and controversial politician of our time examines the former President's beginnings in California...
...Levi joined a band of partisans to fight Italy's Fascists and the Germans. He was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist kept him alive. He worked as a slave at a privately owned I.G. Farben laboratory, which was part of the death-camp complex...
...betraying a testiness that belied his appeals to sweet reason. The Soviet leader's performance at his farewell press conference, in fact, may have undone some of the political gains of the previous three days. After arriving 15 minutes late at the Soviet Union's new Mt. Alto embassy complex, he launched into a detailed 70-minute monologue summing up his talks with Reagan. Near the end of his statement, however, he suddenly delivered a diatribe against the press -- the very group he most needed to win over to get his message across...