Word: culprit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Madame calmly notes one culprit's end: "She was burned at the stake yesterday, not Wednesday, as I had told you . . ." The woman who had been burned as a witch, La Voisin by name, was no innocent victim but a notorious poisoner and promoter of Black Masses. She symbolized the strange, diabolic resistance movement that flourished beneath the surface of official society, just as Madame de Sévigné symbolized the outer serenity and almost Japanese exactitude of social forms. There is no evidence that her 17th century mind understood that underground passion for evil any more than...
...bona fide traitor was a list of French military secrets that it ran across in September 1894. Historian Chapman ably retells the story of how, with a few slipshod handwriting comparisons, a War Office clique decided that studious, impersonable. wealthy and unpopular Captain Alfred Dreyfus was the logical culprit. Author Chapman argues that Dreyfus' court-martial and imprisonment at Devil's Island were mostly a tragedy of honest errors, not a conspiracy of racial malice...
...authorities have at last found the Cypriot whose paintbrush adorned a wall with a slogan offensive to the Governor. Such scenes at police headquarters suggest a boys' game gone terribly wrong- the young, pink-faced British soldier looks almost as scared as the culprit he drags in, squirming and nauseated with fear. This criminal is a schoolboy of 14; the message he painted was "Harding come down from your helicopter." The punishment for the boy's crime: three months in prison...
...juiceless book is not the only culprit. The music is chiefly loud, and at their best Robert Alton's dances are just conventionally lively. Actress Channing is only intermittently victorious. She has her real moments, with her round, seemingly lidless eyes or her rumbling subway of a voice; she can pronounce a word as though bending it in two or rush feverishly about her various farm chores as though running bases in some mad game played on Mars. But her large-limbed wackiness. so wildly wrong for Gladiola Girls and Lorelei Lees as to prove wonderfully right...
...lawyer's wife, who wore a gold pin shaped like a poodle with ruby eyes on a fashionably faded denim dress, spoke up for the culprit. "Maybe," she said, "he's just neurotic. You know, a member of the out-group trying to get in. Or maybe," the afterthought was startling, "maybe he's just trying to be funny...