Word: martyrdom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hard, Gemlike Flame. Many of the new esthetes determinedly marked themselves off from the crowd by what seemed to them the highest forms of both self-indulgence and self-martyrdom. They nourished what they chose to call nostalgie de la boue - "the longing for the gutter." Paul Verlaine, the outstanding poet of his day, was a diseased, perverted dipsomaniac who "wrapped his suppurating limbs ... in vile rags," lived off the earnings of prostitutes, and alternated between "maudlin ferocity [and] mawkish repentance." Accused of being decadent, he replied: "I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. ... It suggests...
...squalid romanticism of the "Naughty Nineties." Oscar Wilde's brilliant career came to a catastrophic end in the world's most sensational vice trial. Poet Francis Thompson, an opium addict, was reduced to destitution, and died leaving behind his minor masterpiece of repentant self-martyrdom, The Hound of Heaven. Poet James Thomson (The City of Dreadful Night) crept starving to the bed of a blind friend, who stretched out his hands and withdrew them covered with the blood of Thomson's fatal hemorrhage. Simeon Solomon died in a poorhouse; consumption killed Ernest Dowson (Cynara) at 33. Brilliant...
Adolf Hitler issued an order of the day to his troops, on the tenth anniversary of compulsory military service under the swastika. He rehashed his personal nightmare of German martyrdom, and concluded: "We witness both in the east and the west what our people would have to face. Our task is therefore clear: to put up resistance and to wear down our enemies so long that, in the end, they will get tired and will yet be broken...
...with Bishop Berggrav and the church martyrs of Norway (TiME, Dec. 25). I know, for it has been my job (in Public Relations and as assistant to the Commanding Officer of the Norwegian Air Force) for three and a half years to hear the stories of Norway's martyrdom firsthand. At night, in the bare, cold barracks, in darkness except for the light shining on my notebook, I have recorded hundreds of stories that might have inspired such a spiritual as Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? Through one of our flyers there...
...dawn light of victory-or perhaps more like his pre-1941 self. After dealing Hitler one of his two heaviest defeats of the year, Stalin's central armies had stopped on the Vistula, while those on the flanks pursued secondary aims. Then followed the ill-timed martyrdom of General Bor and his heroic partisans in Warsaw; the Moscow-sponsored Government at Lublin; the methodical destruction of the London Polish Government. At Dumbarton Oaks, Russia's diplomats insisted that, in the framework of postwar security, no great power (e.g., Russia) should be disciplined without its consent...