Word: idol
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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These events were bitter pills for the Hungarian monarchists. Legitimists flocked to the Opposition; moderates became reactionaries; even Socialists were swayed to monarchism; the onetime Emperor became almost a martyr and his little son, "King" Otto, became a national idol. Count Albert Apponyi was one of the last Hungarian statesmen to see his rightful King alive. Said he once: "I shall never forget the shame of visiting His Majesty at the abbey at Tihany [where he was temporarily imprisoned by Hungarian troops prior to his delivery to the British]. If I had never been a monarchist before, I should have...
...More than 150 years ago a silly young Scotsman came to London. The two salient qualities of his mind were enthusiasm and an insatiable, embarrassing curiosity. Soon he came to worship at a popular shrine of which the idol was a fat, brilliant, untidy person, a rude and witty talker, a man of letters and a genius?Samuel Johnson. For many, this grotesque icon had lost his potency by the time he died. Not so for James Boswell, who bequeathed to the world two important things: one, The Life of Samuel Johnson, a monument to the curiosity of the author...
When the god of football reform has grown bloated, frenzied, and irrational it is not unpleasant to make a pilgrimage to his defeated deity--the gargantuan idol with feet of clay. Thus an October afternoon spent witnessing an old and popular sport is an effective antidote to an over-dose of over-emphasis; illusions concerning the importance of football games have been partially removed and the result is that the logical attitude towards the game--that of sanity, that which minimizes both defeats and victories--is once more practicable. Saturday afternoons are seen in a more normal light: as occasions...
...more interesting, in its preliminary bombast, than the first; due to the burst of note-writing proclivities on the part of each. Now both proceed along the ladder of fame, one downwards, the other up, each to remain in the public memory as long as is customary for fallen idols: for, to assume the pessimistic attitude and to predict the inevitable, each will be a fallen idol in a surprisingly short time, and he whose arm extended aloft in the calcium glare last night is destined to as deep an obliviou as he who failed to heed the final count...
...idol of my heart...