Word: maximation
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...although it's almost a maxim in Greene's world that cynics will always be cynics, the novelist usually does try to convince us that under their hard shells his anti-heroes really do want desperately to believe. If not in politics or in love, (at least not for long), then in religion and the afterlife. The place they perpetually go in Greene's novels to quaff their spiritual thirst is the Catholic Church; and if their inability to take God seriously keeps them from having faith, at least they can while away their time feeling guilty. The most successful...
...Lebanon strike reflected a Weizman maxim. "Israel," he has remarked, "is condemned to fight from time to time. She has to plan her wars more carefully than any other country and achieve all her targets in a very short time." In closed meetings, he has added that "Israel under Begin's rule and myself at the defense desk will not absorb the first strike but will take the pre-emptive strike...
...Donny's sometime-assistant and partner in petty crime. Donny's theory is somewhat simplistic, summarized in the phrase "Action talks and bullshit walks." The point of this diatribe seems to be that everyone must look out for themselves. Stuart Burney's Donny seems painfully aware of this maxim, finding it distasteful, perhaps, but true. Burney lends an air of realism to his character; his Bonny is like thousands of backstreets city kids aware of the odds against them and unable to score anything more than marginal victories against the system that keeps them in place...
...unexpected." The critic was Count Leo Tolstoy, and these and other remarks appear in two volumes of Tolstoy's Letters (Scribners; $35), the first comprehensive translation into English of the Russian writer's prolific correspondence. In notes to friends and fellow authors like I.S. Turgenev, Maxim Gorky, H.G. Wells and Rainer Maria Rilke, Tolstoy also takes a hard look at his own work. War and Peace, he concedes, is in some parts "long-winded and inaccurate...
...this war while admitting that "people don't even want to hear about it." Happily, he does not take the next step and insist that people damn well ought to hear about it for their own good. Nor does he justify his work by parading Santayana's maxim about the uses of history; instead, he deflates it: "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too." He preaches no sermons, draws no morals, enters no ideological disputes. He simply suggests that some stories must be told-not because they will delight and instruct but because they...