Word: madman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...future one hopes that the ominous cries of Cambridge's colored prophetess will remind hurried passers-by of Nietzsche's allegory of the madman who was met with the laughter of the unbelieving populace when he rushed to the marketplace with a lantern in the early morning hours seeking...
...never seem coarse or even very vigorous. The basis of the comic subplot is the duping of Malvolio, the puritanical steward, by a group of cheerful tosspots--a little joke which has occasionally struck critics as cruel, since Malvolio is at one point chained in a dungeon as a madman. Before Mr. Heeley's backcloth, under Mr. Benthall's guidance, it appears a mild, if merry, escapade, instinct with finesse...
Barely 72 hours later, the Communist military commander for the Fukien district of South China, who may not be a madman but hardly qualifies as a preserver of the peace, sent crashing out an entirely different message, addressed to the Nationalist Chinese garrison entrenched on Quemoy Island: "No military works can avoid complete destruction under the assault of our modern army and air force . . . The landing on Quemoy is imminent . . . Surrender...
...book. Humbert's ignominious, fatal obsession is for little girls in the 9-14 bracket-not ordinary little girls but a special kind he calls "nymphets." As Humbert explains it in a passage that is typical of his style: "You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs-the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness...
...failing of which he was conscious. He envied Wagner his heroic themes and majestic brasses, idolized Verdi's poetic tragedies, in later life even made an effort to understand the moderns (although on first hearing he thought Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps "the creation of a madman...