Word: madams
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...exact opposite of that "fit audience . . . though few" to which the poet Milton addressed his work. It will very likely hit the mark. If Playwrights Ryerson & Clements haven't invented a single thing, neither have they missed a single trick: they even remember to wedge the madam of a bordello into a frightfully genteel tea party. And though the authors are never witty, they have an uncanny sense of what will get a laugh; the secret being that it has always gotten one before...
...This, Madam," said the imperial ghost, "is no strange place to me. It is our former estate of Livadia. Allow me to cite the Intourist's Pocket Guide to the Soviet Union: 'This estate occupies 350 hectares of land, and includes a large park, two palaces and many vineyards. The newer palace [you are standing on its roof], built in 1911 by Krasnov in the style of the Italian Renaissance, is of white Inkerman stone, and contains nearly a hundred rooms. It has now been changed into a sanatorium for sick peasants, although certain of the rooms have...
...must ask you, Madam," said the Muse of History, "to stop dancing up & down on this roof. These old palaces are scarcely more substantial than you ghosts. I am glad to see that Marxism has had the same psychotherapeutic effect on you as on so many neurotics who join the Communist Party. But your notions about Russia and Stalin are highly abnormal. All right-thinking people now agree that Russia is a mighty friend of democracy. Stalin has become a conservative. In a few hours the whole civilized world will hail the historic decisions just reached beneath your feet...
...must say, though, that for a Muse of History, you seem to have a very slight grasp of the historical dialectic. It is difficult for me to understand how a contemporary of the dialectician, Heraclitus of Ephesus, can still think in the static concepts of 19th-Century liberalism. History, Madam, is not a suburban trolley line which stops to accommodate every housewife with bundles in her arms...
...Muse of History drew the Tsarevich to her, for he had become restless. "Poor little bleeder," she said, stroking his hair, "different only in the organic nature of your disease from so many others who have bled and died. In answer to your question, Madam," she said, glancing at the Tsarina, "I never permit my foreknowledge to interfere with human folly, if only be cause I never expect human folly to learn much from history...