Word: masters
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Culinary Master. This man who bargained so confidently with the world had almost every day of his life to bargain with Stalin. Yet he talked freely, never seemed worried lest he commit an indiscretion, cracked irreverent jokes. In 1946 a group of leading officials were sitting in Mikoyan's dacha, a crenelated red brick atrocity created by a 19th century czarist sugar baron. Malenkov's wife began grumbling about how poor and scarce Soviet nylons were. Snapped Mikoyan: "Yes, my dear young lady, but we have plenty of portraits of Stalin...
...excellent cook who likes to serve Armenian fare with bottled Crimean wine bearing typewritten notes identifying place of origin, Mikoyan once invited his' crony, the late Secret Police Boss Lavrenty Beria, to try some of his specialties. Beria, sniffing the shish-kebab, saluted him as "Comrade Culinary Master." "Yes, yes," replied Mikoyan, with graveyard humor, "but my dear Lavrenty Pavlovich, in my kitchen you don't find a single damn piece of human meat...
...great jokester, with a neurotic's ability to charm a world he could not master. In 1835 he wrote what brilliant Novelist-Critic Vladimir Nabokov calls the greatest play in Russian. The Government Inspector. The conception, suggested to Gogol by Pushkin, was ingenious: a character is mistaken in a provincial town for an important government official, and the whole corrupt, incoherent Russian officialdom is exposed in apparently hilarious farce. Czar Nicholas I himself saw the play and is said to have remarked (roughly translated): "Everyone gets the business here. Me most of all." Gogol and his adored Czar thought...
...Napoleon ruled the Continent. Like Hitler more than a century later, he was obsessed by the idea that if he could master England, he would become master of the world. And he was sure that, if he could control the Straits of Dover even for twelve hours, England would be his. From the Channel port of Boulogne, he wrote: "The Channel is a mere ditch...
...hunger while a rainstorm unmercifully keeps him from death by thirst, he imagines that he is Atlas and Prometheus. By the time the gulls have become flying lizards to him, he imagines-in the fictional season's most unpleasant metaphor for the condition of man-the last huge master-maggot of a box previously full of smaller maggots which, he has heard, are cultivated by Chinese gourmets...