Word: mania
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...author depicts peasants, priests and princes with the authoritative relish of a man who has grown up with his subjects without ever growing tired of them. He brilliantly evokes the Italian love of the land that borders on mania and some times crosses that border. The past itself is perhaps the most memorable character in Ippolita, and it is as haunting, grave and startling in its reality as Hamlet's father's ghost...
...other hand, by sly understatement, his chipper account poked fun at officious "bashi-bazouks" like the camp Kommandant, and a corporal whose mania for counting and recounting the prisoners prompted one inmate to swear: "After this war is over. I am going to buy a German soldier and keep him in the garden and count him six times a day." Concluded Plum: "I would say that a prison is all right for a visit, but I wouldn't live there if you gave it to me." Bertie Wooster could hardly have put it better after a night...
...barbershop, where his mother, Leonor da Silva Quadros, the daughter of a small-time immigrant Argentine cattleman, tried to keep house, and where his pharmacist father, Gabriel, made life miserable for them both. Gabriel, says one of Quadros' close friends, "was abnormal-a real villain with a mania for women, displaying constant aggressiveness toward his son and wife." Pursued by bill collectors, the family flitted from town to town, until at 16 Jânio was finally allowed to settle in São Paulo. He took a year's course in education, started teaching part time...
...demented by the mania of owning things...
Assigned to a Cossack village, Davidov is soon packing a gun for protection and wrangling with his two assistants, one of whom stays up all night studying English while the other develops a mania for butchering the village cats to protect his pet pigeons...