Word: greatness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Silent Screen has that terrifying speed that distinguishes the great horses from the good ones. He will certainly be the winter book favorite for the Kentucky Derby. With a little bit of luck, he will be covered with roses in Louisville this coming...
...letters" are critics and journalists-as distinguished from novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative persons, though countless creators served as men of letters too. His well-read line of English literary men should really be traced back to Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets began the great industry of literary criticism and gossip. But what began with a bang (Johnson was capable of no lesser noise) is clearly ending in a whisper. Between Johnson and Eliot lay the great age of the literary thunderheads, roughly dated between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the onset of World...
...they were the same sort of thing. Pundits who teach poetry as a matter of the palate-or of professional gain-naturally detest and fear a creative man of letters like Ezra Pound, to whom poetry was a passion in which the soul was engaged in mortal questions of great consequence. Sir Edmund Gosse, for instance, a pompous Edwardian booktaster of great influence and reputation, once referred to Pound as "that preposterous American filibuster and Provençal charlatan." Gosse's dislikes were cordially returned. The young Evelyn Waugh saw Gosse as an "ill-natured habitue of the great...
Richelieu foiled most of his enemies, including his great rival, the Spanish Minister, Olivares. After Richelieu had outmaneuvered him, Olivares blandly offered his angry king, Philip IV, a choice 17th century sophistry: "God wants us to make peace, for He is depriving us visibly and absolutely of all means of war." The great Cardinal outwitted himself, however, when he subsidized the warmaking of the fanatic Swedish Protestant, Gustavus Adolphus. Richelieu counted on Gustavus to harry the Austrian Hapsburgs, which he did. But the Cardinal was unable to keep Gustavus leashed, and until the Swede's death...
...impoverished country gentry, he had social ambitions and possessed extraordinary charm. Yet he was without humor. He could play the guitar. He kept 14 cats. He suffered the torments of migraine, piles and piety-O'Connell at least grants him piety, though he often has been considered a great hypocrite. He was certainly a ruthless schemer all his life. After receiving a bishopric through family connections, at the age of 21, he used his clerical rank and tiny diocese as a steppingstone to power. He maneuvered for years to become First Minister of France, and in his early days...