Word: enigma
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...Beaverbrook, practical, plain-spoken Thomson was a new and alarming enigma in the publishing world. With disarming candor, Thomson always admitted that he was in the newspaper business only for profit. "I buy newspapers to make money to buy more newspapers to make more money," he once announced. "As for editorial content," said the Canadian-born publisher who at 71 owns 128 newspapers and 80 magazines, "that's the stuff you separate the ads with...
What Mahler left of the work was a patchy sketch of seemingly inscrutable calligraphy. In 1924, Composer Ernst Krřenek stitched together the more fully outlined first and third movements, but abandoned the rest as unsalvageable. Then in 1960, British Musicologist Deryck Cooke set out to solve the enigma. Making a painstaking note-by-note transcription of Mahler's sketch, Cooke "found to my amazement that what I was slowly writing down was entirely intelligible and indeed fascinating music...
...many of these same clergy and laymen describe Paul as a puzzle, an enigma, a Hamlet. "He has such a blah personality," complains one New York suburban housewife. A baffled Jesuit philosopher says: "I feel like a bull in a ring. Sometimes he goes one way, and I try to follow him, and then he goes the other way. Cagey, amorphous personalities make me unhappy." Many Catholic progressives are now convinced that Paul has deliberately sided all along with the conservative Curia, and they openly resent it. Austrian Historian Friedrich Heer fumes at "this small, narrow-minded, petit bourgeois person...
...enormous enigma of Johann Wolfgang Goethe has bewildered and fascinated two centuries of Western culture. In Germany he is worshiped as a demi-divinity; Albert Schweitzer, for instance, modeled much of his life on Goethe's. Yet in the English-speaking world his works are very little read. The Goethe of transatlantic reputation is the plaster Zeus of Weimar who thundered at secretaries and toadied to princes ("Blessed are those who draw near to the great of this world!"). Of his works, only Faust is famous, largely because Charles Gounod made grand opera of it, and only...
...Another enigma surrounding the swiftest knockout ever in a heavyweight title fight was Clay's failure to go to a neutral corner immediately. After the knockdown Clay hovered over Liston and hollered a few vilifications at him. As I've always understood the rule, a fighter must retire to a neutral corner before the countdown begins. If Clay had thought the knockdown were legitimate, he wouldn't have jeopardized his chances for a first-round victory by carrying on a little social chat with his prostrate victim before going to a corner...