Word: gantlets
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Virtually every great composer has given up some blood to the critics' gantlet. John Ruskin (whose true critical specialty was art) described Beethoven's music as sounding like "the upsetting of bags of nails." Chopin's music was damned in its entirety by London's Musical World as "ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony." Tchaikovsky was assured by the Boston Evening Transcript that his new Fifth Symphony was "pandemonium, delerium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded." And Tchaikovsky himself was not above recording a terse opinion about Brahms: "That scoundrel . . . What a giftless bastard...
...meeting places with goons. The Fifteenth Congressional District convention, for example, was held in the headquarters of a U.A.W. local. Delegates were received in a small anteroom where half a dozen factory workers watched while credentials were checked. If a delegate passed, he was allowed to proceed through a gantlet of guards, one of whom was armed with something resembling a baseball bat. If the delegate was considered unfriendly, he might be seated on the convention floor with a husky C.I.O. "guardian" on either side. With the aid of such tactics the Williams coalition carried...
...arrived from Chief Apoena. Escorted by the chief's sons, Mereiles and a few other I.P.S. men set forth on the first white men's visit to a Chavante chief in his own village. After three days' steady march, they passed between a five-mile gantlet of Apoena's sentries. Finally they came to a halt before the hut where the chief lived with his three wives. Chavante braves, their bare bodies daubed with bright-hued clays, broke into a wild welcome dance. Apoena himself, in a breech clout and wooden earrings, stood before Mereiles, addressed...
Having picked up its Rockville Centre passengers, No. 175 headed up the gantlet toward New York City again. James Markin, in the motorman's cubicle, started to pick up speed, had time only to yank his whistle before disaster struck...
Apparently disregarding a warning block signal, apparently blind to the glare of No. lys's approaching headlight, Motorman Jacob Kiefer took No. 192 down the section of double track and roared on into the gantlet. Markin's whistle was a shrill and hopeless warning of the rending crash of steel on steel as the two trains collided...