Word: maniacs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Wrung Necks. Napoleon was a maniac for detail, and one of the first of the Organization Men. He demanded and got a running record of every regiment, including a summary of its encounters, its numerical strength, the roll of its injured and sick and the number of its annual recruitment. He commanded an elaborate network of spies who informed him minutely of the strength and movements of his adversaries. He centralized authority absolutely in himself, and his precise, ingeniously correlated orders of march gained a maneuverability for his army that was far in excess of that enjoyed by any other...
Chief villain is the standard maniac in uniform-in this case a sensible-sounding but psychopathic U.S. Navy officer named James William Geraghty, commander of a nuclear submarine that is submerged under 50 ft. of polar ice when the big blowout comes on Christmas, 1965. When Geraghty finally surfaces, he finds himself on top: every higher-ranking officer is dead. After using machine guns to quell a rebellion by U.S. survivors who get it into their heads to elect a civilian government, he sets himself up as World Leader, or Commander-1. In his brave new science-fiction world...
...Curse of the Living Corpse, despite its air of amateur Grand Guignol, unreels with grisly assurance. The plot involves "a homicidal maniac-bent on revenge by the most horrible means possible." Though locked in the family vault, a late and unlamented patriarch seemingly wants to settle his estate heir by heir. One morning the hired girl comes up on the dumb-waiter head first. Head only, in fact. Subsequent victims are cruelly disfigured, dragged behind a horse, stabbed, burned alive, or drowned in the bath. In this orgy of supermarket sadism, the blood looks like Brand X catchup, but there...
...deprive someone who has not yet read it of all desire to do so." Third, the romantic novelist, whose "happy hunting ground is the field of unanswerable questions, particularly if they concern the private lives of the authors." Finally, Auden says, "jolliest of them all is the maniac. The commonest of his kind is the man who believes that poetry is written in cyphers... My favorite is the John Bellendon Kerr who set out to prove that English nursery rhymes were originally written in a form of Old Dutch invented by himself...
Classified in Auden's terms, Monroe K. Spears, author of Disenchanted Island, mixes the qualities of the critic's critic and the maniac. As critic's critic, Spears approaches Auden through close textual study, drawing information from all of Auden's work, from the writers and musicians that influenced him, and from the poet's life. As maniac be is intensely concerned with Auden's language and symbolism. Yet Spear's study of Auden, while exhaustive, intelligent, and scholarly, is also unsatisfactory --unsatisfactory for people who read criticism of poetry in order to understand the poetry's appeal more fully...