Word: impromptu
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...after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, Berlin's vast Kroll Opera House was pressed into service last week by Speaker Göring. In a quarter-mile-wide cordon around it he threw his police and black-jacketed S. S. Storm Troops. Sweating carpenters rushed up a huge banner over the impromptu Reichstag portals: WE FIGHT AND PRAY FOR ADOLF HITLER...
...about himself. Says his friend and translator Haakon Chevalier, after sitting in on conferences with Paul Yalery, Count Keyserling, Aldous Huxley, Jules Romains and some 20 other leading European intellectuals: ''I can honestly say that not one of them could match Malraux for verbal artistry, for penetrating impromptu analysis of a wide range of subjects, or for knowledge of contemporary events...
...list of distinguishing characteristics, the gentleman must needs become a philosopher, and will drape himself in a chair and discourse by the hour, and entertainingly, too, on anything from the late Mr. Napoleon to the publicity drives of the local humorous publication. Enhanced by rhetorical jerks and gestures, these impromptu orations are nothing if not picturesque, and show evidence of deep and clear thought...
Police worked like beavers wiring down iron gratings, removing fences from tree trunks, piles of paving blocks and other impromptu weapons, and warning cafe proprietors to clear their terraces of siphons and heavy saucers. A dozen times angry crowds, led by Royalists, were beaten back by police reserves. Meanwhile the first duel resulting from Stavisky revelations was fought by Deputy André Hesse and Lawyer Joseph Beneix in the empty stadium of the Parc des Princes which can seat 20,000. The duelists missed each other twice and stalked furiously from the field. When dapper Prefect of Police Jean Chiappe...
...General Boulanger to the harried cabinet of M. Chautemps. Thousands of police and brass-hatted Republican Guardsmen guard the Chamber of Deputies and other government buildings. Meanwhile, mobs of otherwise respectable citizens scurry up and down the boulevards, battling with the constabulary. The streets have been torn up and impromptu fortifications constructed; all cafes have closed their doors and brought their tables inside; rioters have braved the charges of the gendarmes and ruined all efforts of mounted squadrons to disperse them by tossing magnesium flares at their horses...