Word: dust
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Risk of War." Besieged Berlin was tense and tired. A chilly rain fell. U.S. and British armored cars prowled sluggishly through streets that breathed the smells peculiar to ruins in the rain-smells of wet bricks, damp dust and scorched wood. On street corners, people gathered to haggle over the exchange rate between Soviet and Western marks or to buy black market herring. At the Anhalter station, where the city's food supplies from the Western zones used to roll in, before the Russians blocked the railway, only a few forlorn figures stirred-an old man in ill-fitting...
Across the road, the seven-story Daiwa department store began to crumble, swaying crazily. Ripping, cracking and crashing sounds came from it as sections within collapsed. Yellow dust rose over the city, and suddenly a strong, crazy wind blew up, first from one direction, then another. After a moment's silence came the small voices of human beings-shouts and cries which rose into a din throughout the city. At 5:27 a thin grey wisp of smoke crawled up behind the sagging department store. It grew larger. The fire had begun...
Sometimes the consequence is painful. There is the book whose title was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." A Handful of Dust tells about a dull Englishman whose dedicated obsession is to retrieve from the waste of time and progress the hideous country house which is his real love. His wife betrays him with a cheap social hanger-on who is not even physically attractive. His son & heir is killed. To save his sanity, the man betrayed by life & death goes abroad. In South...
Readers have complained that A Handful of Dust is not as gay as Waugh's earlier novels. It is, in fact, the terrifying crater of the abyss in which Waugh exists. Waugh is a conservative. In his case, this implies an intense sensitivity to the beauty of past forms, an organic response to the moral order that produced them. Waugh is a lover of tradition and hierarchy. In a world which denies hierarchy in the name of equality and tradition in the name of progress, Waugh is a lonely and an angry man. The modern world revolts...
...minutes the shallow, dome-shaped hill was lost in smoke and dust. Spitfires swooped in wide spirals, loosing their rockets. Gradually the quick chatter of the rebels' Breda and Spandau machine guns was subdued and the slower Greek army Brens took over. Twenty-five minutes after the attack began, green Very lights arched over the crest. The position had been taken...