Word: fortress
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...senior Congressmen are all incompetent or senile. One case in point is Carl Hayden, who was an able chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee for most of his 14-year tenure, until his retirement in 1968 at the age of 91. Sometimes, too, a good chairman, secure in his fortress of seniority, can use his position to kill or modify a popular but unwise measure that colleagues support. Over the years, New York's Emanuel Celler, 82, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has quietly smothered several injudicious anti-subversive and anti-crime bills...
Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...
When the firemen arrived, they were struck by an unusual silence. Only a few flames could be seen flickering through the roof of the fortress-like, cinder-block building, and the men assumed that it was a minor fire. But when they pried open an emergency exit at Le Cinq-Sept, a popular dance hall for youths in Saint-Laurent-du-Pont near Grenoble, two of the firemen fainted. Bodies were stacked before them in ghastly contortions of agony. Fists were literally fried against the locked door. Impressions of hands, arms and heads were fused into the cement wall. Almost...
...atmospherics were significant. Aside from showing the flag with a flourish, Nixon demonstrated again the wide reach of his office and of U.S. policy. His entrée to the spiritual fortress that is the Vatican, the facility with which he dealt with a Communist ruler in Belgrade and a Falangist in Madrid, as well as formal allies in Rome and London-all combined to convey a sense of healthy diversity. Massive television coverage showed him not only in formal association with world leaders but in human communication with ordinary citizens. Grinning, standing on a car, his arms flung...
...this may impress Westerners-until they happen to get sick in Russia. By U.S. standards, many Soviet hospitals are as crowded and shabby as the New York City subway. The typical building is a grim fortress with old equipment in poor repair. The food is plentiful but dull; instead of tissues and toilet paper, the patient makes do with yesterday's Pravda. The institutions are well described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his novel, The Cancer Ward. To some patients, though, such hospitals look like paradise. Among them are alcoholics, a major Soviet problem, who can wind up in "corrective...