Word: islands
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Norfolk Island, Australian Territory
Castro made one of the most startlingly audacious speeches ever heard in a courtroom. Secretly printed and distributed throughout the island under the title La Historia Me Absolvera (History Will Absolve Me), it combined the tragic hopelessness of Daniel Webster debating the devil before a jury of condemned souls in Benet's short story, the irony of Marc Antony's appeal to the Roman mobs, and parts of the political theory of John of Salisbury, John Locke, Thomas Paine, and the Cuban national hero, Jose Marti. Had the Cuban island more significance in world affairs, Castro's 60,000 word...
...island is a bleak South Atlantic rock ten miles long and seven miles wide. Eight months of the year it rains, three months the sun blazes down, one month it is bearable. Of 600 officers and men of H.M.S. Conqueror, stationed at the island in the early 19th century, more than 100 died in an 18-month period of hepatitis and amoebic dysentery. A rat-infested house on the atherapeutic isle served as prison for the man who had marched vast armies from Moscow to Madrid, and once ruled half the Christian world. Only a few years before, Napoleon...
Chess, Anyone? As for Gourgaud, he was a temperamental bachelor who seems to have had a homosexual crush on Napoleon, but Bonaparte was strictly heterosexual, and Gourgaud eventually left the island in a vicious pet. Las Cases had gone to St. Helena for the book he knew Napoleon had in him, and took dictation till his eyes gave out. Indeed, they all took dictation and kept journals, perhaps suspecting posterity's avalanche of books about Napoleon, though some of the entries are revealingly non-Napoleonic, e.g., Gourgaud's statement that if Las Cases tried...
...Mermaid Madonna, by Stratis Myrivilis. Life is harsh, but the living of it sweet, in this island idyl of the wine-dark sea by one of Greece's finest novelists...