Word: megalomaniacs
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...Protestant ethic. But neither really faces the fact that ingesting psychedelics is different from taking heroin or watching television. S. Clarke Woodroe goes a bit deeper. Discussing the drug experiences of Baudelaire, de Quincey and other writers, he makes some interesting points about the relation between drugs, megalomaniac delusions, and intellectual creativity...
Prophet Without Honor. To many of his critics, France's towering, turbulent leader seems, as H. G. Wells once said, to be "an utterly sincere megalomaniac." Catholic Novelist François Mauriac wrote with greater insight: "He appears as though delegated by historic France to living France, in order that it should remember what a great nation it has been." In fact, De Gaulle has had a lifelong conviction that his mission is to lead France to new greatness. Hauteur and intransigence have always been weapons in that fight. For much of his life, he has been either...
Quite appropriately, he chose to tell the story of a man (William Randolph Hearst) who shared his talent for big ideas and big success. And yet, he did not take the easy way out and laugh at Kane for the pompous megalomaniac that he was; he strove to make him a human being instead of a straw man like the one Andy Griffith played in A Face in the Crowd, a movie vaguely reminiscent of Kane. Indeed, Welles could never be called supersubtle in his characterization of Kane as a love-starved neurotic, but then he entirely avoids simple caricature...
Oedipal Wreck. Ensuing events follow each other to confusion like derailed freight cars. They involve the sergeant's stepfather, a Senator who trades on his war wound and resembles McCarthy as played by Lou Costello, and his mother, a megalomaniac who maneuvers the Senator like a windup toy and makes an Oedipal wreck...
...generously offered himself as "your shield-bearer." It is Galileo's disregard of Kepler, even to the point of not sending him a telescope he asked for, that influences Koestler's frank distaste for Galileo. Far from being a martyr, Koestler believes, Galileo was a pompous megalomaniac, who alienated his Jesuit friends and the benevolence of Pope Urban VIII, until he forced his own trial. But in the main, Author Koestler is equable-tempered and gives Galileo full marks for crumbling the Aristotelian notion of the eternal immutability of the upper heavens...