Word: demoniacal
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...Demoniac Saint. Antonio Conselheiro believed that the Roman Catholic Church was doing the will of Satan. His morality combined the absolute license of free love with chastity exaggerated "to the point where woman is looked upon with horror"- his followers accepted half of this, and practiced free love. Because his disciples renovated abandoned cemeteries, built new churches and restored old ones, the priests "good-naturedly tolerated the excesses of this demoniac saint who at least helped to increase their dwindled revenues." By 1877 Conselheiro was famous, feared, implacable, "a species of great man gone wrong," ascetic, thin, weary-looking, half...
...Rochester is not meant to be amusing. For Cinemactor Welles to play Rochester as a man of ham, not of heart, wrenches the whole mood of Jane Eyre. But in the opening reels, little Peggy Ann Garner (as the child Jane), brilliantly abetted by Henry Daniell (as a demoniac preacher-schoolmaster), and by some loud-pedaled cinemaginativeness, establishes a nightmarish chiaroscuro of pity and gloom which, if sustained, might have made Jane Eyre a great picture...
...assorted pipe addicts (the caption, in the mouths of two elderly ladies, is "Bother-it's a smoker!"). An Emett dining car, where rabbit is being served, affords, by virtue of a sharp curve in the track, a view of the train's last car where the demoniac chef is in the act of snatching the bunnies alive from the very roadside. Emett's crazily antiquated rolling stock often shows the most charmingly ornamental cabinet work, and for anyone who has ever felt the obsessive fascination of pastoral narrow-gauge lines, with grass and weeds between...
Early one morning three years ago this week the curtains of Adolf Hitler's study in Berlin's huge Reich Chancellery stirred gently in the breeze. Inside, after seven nearly sleepless days of conferences and feverish meditation, the demoniac leader of Germany had reached his decision. A few minutes later, and hundreds of miles away, a German bomber snarled through the grey, drizzling Polish dawn and dropped a missile on the fishing village and air base of Puck. World War II had begun...
Rommel was well known to be a demoniac master of desert war, but neither the British nor the U.S. public was prepared for Tobruk's fall. For it followed weeks of such cheery headlines as these: Planes pound Axis units in Libya. . . . British in Libya mopping up. . . . Heroic stand at Bir Hachéim foils Rommel. . . . Axis road to Egypt barred. . . . Even two days after Tobruk fell, the New York World-Telegram still bleated: R.A.F. Blasts Nazis in Libya...