Word: mad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...chief of a community so regarded. He badgered the government in Rome into replacing the mountain mule track with a real road down to Nola and arranged for a rickety bus to make the run once a day. But the people of Visciano thought he was slightly mad to wish them onto such a terrifying machine, and they stuck to their mules...
...casualty-report style; the loss of a barrel of a machine gun has the same weight as the death of a crazed corporal who tries to mine a flame-throwing tank, and whose head "burned like a match." In the book's most telling episode, a captain goes mad when he is compelled to execute as a deserter a stunned and muddled laggard sergeant major who is trying to get back to his unit. Author Ledig, a twice-wounded veteran of the Russian front, has given his royalties from this painful book to an orphanage for war victims. Readers...
...Republic," white-haired and bursting with emotion, returned to Paris with the more-than-vague hope that the Republic would reciprocate by making him its head. That was not to be. Through the siege of Paris by the Prussians and the bloody uprising of the Commune ("Both sides are mad"), Hugo wrote and loved on. One of his late conquests: Actress Sarah Bernhardt, then 28 to Hugo's 70. As age advanced, he grudged the speechmaking demanded of him by his grateful country. "To make a speech is more exhausting for me than making love three times," he said...
...Mad. Later, dealers beg him for pictures, but Stephen declaims: "Success, especially popular success, imprisons the spirit." He paints only "to satisfy himself," and soliloquizes: "We're all mad, or half mad . . . perpetually in conflict with society . . . All except the ones who compromise." He, of course, "has never done that...
...lethargic but lovely adornment of a banker's bed, is the only member of the cast who seems really to be having a good time. Her acting is exaggerated, but happy. As the inevitable French butler, Earl Edgerton is dull, but in the role of a half-mad old man, David Roberts gives the finest performance of the evening. He is imaginative, witty and relaxed. In contrast, Lucia French, playing a disillusioned actress, seems embarrassed and tense...