Word: defenselessness
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...smoke them out. No other modern writer has so deftly exposed man's savagery beneath his civilized veneer. "James saw [the world] a place of torment," his personal secretary Theodora Bosanquet wrote, "where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenseless children of light. He saw fineness sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. He hated the tyranny of persons over each other...
Australopithecus, like all higher primates, is unspecialized. He is physiologically equipped with no defenses; even the sharp canine teeth of his ape ancestors, Proconsul, are gone. His brain is only slightly larger than that of an ape. The most natural question to ask is, how could such a generalized defenseless creature exist...
...difference between human beings-that between torturers and tortured." Again there is the relish in operating on the reader without anesthetic. But in The Quarry, Duerrenmatt, who studied philosophy before he became a writer, seems to have added a new spiritual element of hope. A man's dogged, defenseless, hopeless commitment to the pursuit of justice-even, like Barlach's, to the point of sacrificing his own life-may bring a savior named Gulliver to the rescue...
...Counts? It is the very young and defenseless who seem to get the worst shake from the tot-book people. No sensitive pre-Dewey adult could read some of these first "reading aids" without revulsion, and to read a number of them produces an effect of mild narcolepsy. Many have been clearly influenced by the notorious "look-say" teaching method, and if a large percentage of children under eight can barely read, the reason could be that what they are permitted to read is witless and dull. Probably the safest rule for the adult buyer is to avoid any book...
...Munich but at the locust years, 1934 and 1935, that the finger of criticism should be pointed." For despite Chamberlain's "most valiant" championship of rearmament in the mid-'30's, so little was done that by September 1938. Britain was almost completely defenseless against air attack, had only a token quantity of modern antiaircraft guns and one operational Spitfire squadron. "After Munich," says Iain Macleod, "the last strong hopes of peace were not allowed to hold back our accelerating preparations against...