Word: mania
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...most accomplished villains (Basil Rathbone) in the cellars of the Tower of London circa 1480. There, amidst moaning victims, clanking chains and chopping blocks, Villain Rathbone (the crookbacked Richard, Duke of Gloucester) shows Monster Karloff (Mord, the club-footed constable of the Tower) how to satisfy an active homicidal mania by murdering the four candidates who are preventing Duke Richard from becoming King Richard III of England. By the time Mord and Richard have killed Henry VI, the Duke of Clarence, Edward V and his brother, they are killed themselves at the battle of Bosworth...
...With his mania for perfection in fundamentals, his devoted scouting corps (mostly former pupils who would still die for dear old Neyland) and the Southeastern Conference rules that permit subsidized players, The Major has been able to mobilize an increasingly formidable squad each year. This year's is probably his best...
...director of Oxford's famed Institute of Experimental Psychology, last week upped the number of such diagnoses to 14: "Sir Nevile Henderson's final report on the actions of Herr Hitler confirms my conclusion . . . that he has every symptom of the paranoiac who is suffering from persecutory mania and whose brainstorms and megalomania will increase until his madness is so apparent that he must be isolated...
...only when serenely detached from all information." On John Garner: "You play a straight oftener than almost any other man I know." On consistency: "But there never has been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency." On himself: "I suffer from cacoethes loquendi, a mania or itch for talking, and from vanity . . . and morbidity, and, as is obvious to everyone who knows me, an inborn, an inveterate flair for histrionics. ... I am pachydermatous. ... I am a veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano on behalf of Democratic principles...
Kansas City and the U. S. then learned how rich, mighty Tom Pendergast got into so queasy a mess. According to the prosecution, Boss Tom wagered $2,000,000, lost $600,000 on horse races in 1935 alone. "It has been a mania with him," said Defense Attorney (and Democratic County Chairman) John G. Madden. Lawyer Madden pleaded heart trouble as reason for a light sentence: "Imprisonment would mean death. He can't survive if he enters a cell . . . . Here we have death in life. . . . I ask the utmost clemency...