Word: deviled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only convince them." Matthew had the admirable but unexciting virtues of a seagoing Alger hero. Utterly efficient, he ran a taut but not too happy ship, stressing maximum standards of hygiene and minimum shore liberty. When corporal punishment was abolished, he predicted that the Navy would "go to the devil...
...Laurence Olivier, whose undisputed ability to depict fallen tragic heroes is matched by his less-famed skill at depicting tragicomic grotesque nobodies. Death's nobody is Edgar, an aging Swedish army captain quartered on an island. Symbolically, it is an out post of hell, an arid devil's island of an awful marriage that has lasted almost 25 years. Wife Alice (Geraldine McEwan) is a viper-vampire, bleeding her husband of self-respect. She refuses to let him forget that he never rose to the rank of major, that his only accomplishment is an obsolete manual on small...
...proposition was this. All the evil in the world, the race hate and his own decline was caused by the devil and the CIA. It was the same shop-worn devil but now, in this century, no longer served by solitary, gutted souls but by an institution. There is so little poetry in the CIA, so much that is pedestrian and mean that no one but George could dare to attribute cosmic force to it. He carried it off though. He always had a cigarette in his mouth when he said it and tilted his head back waiting...
Satan seizes the Master's manuscript and, in the Communist manner, proceeds to rewrite history. He allows the Biblical Pilate the satisfaction of killing Judas, and the further mercy of believing that the Crucifixion never took place at all. Thus does the Devil bless mankind by giving it a comfortable lie by which to live. The Master can forget his obsession and remains in peace with his beautiful mistress Margarita (who has given up a promising career as a witch for his sake). But Bulgakov makes clear his own belief: Pilate's guilt, an expedient cowardice that allows...
Bulgakov's last irony is a tortured one supported by an epigraph from Goethe's Faust, to the effect that the Devil is the force that "wills forever evil yet does forever good." The Communist road of good intentions gives way to the hell of Soviet reality; this is Bulgakov's message-the essence of his "slander...