Word: mercilessly
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...life of crushing respectability in an awful welfare-state township, pray to the Virgin to be relieved of their childlessness. Their prayers are answered. But the Madonna in "heir church, a figure carved from Irish Dog oak, is black as ebony; so, too, is their first-born child. This merciless story makes plain that neither inheritance nor adultery with a Jamaican can explain the couple's embarrassingly Negroid blessing. For all its apparent defiance of realism, this kind of Spark fiction-typical of most tales in this collection-has honest intentions: to make vivid the author's conviction...
...scan the men in the TV studio are devoid both of prejudice and of any softening human kindness. For the candidates there is no place to hide, no way of ducking behind a "no comment" or a sonorous platitude. Every quaver of voice, every fleeting grimace, is subject to merciless scrutiny...
Fearless & Merciless. Bobby has had far better luck in his crash program to register new voters. "The Democrats are there," he says, "and if we are going to win this election, we just have to reach them." As director of the program, Jack Kennedy selected his friend, Representative Frank ("Fearless") Thompson Jr., a handsome, hard-driving New Jersey Congressman who matches Bobby's own energy and relentless single-mindedness. Working around the clock and country, Frank Thompson has spent $100,000 on the program, recruiting 200,000 door-to-door canvassers to goad laggard voters into the registration centers...
...wrong hair. His only crime is. he confesses, "the fact that I am alive"-although he explains in a frenzied bout of surrealist logic that he is not exactly responsible for that. Reading his fabulous and farcical misadventures is an experience like being cornered by a compulsive talker whose merciless spate of words first glazes the eye until a thread of rewarding sense emerges from the gabble. In this respect, he is unlike the typical Chaplin figure, whose weapon was silence, but like Chaplin's little fellow, he is a reincarnation of the classic non-hero of Jewish folklore...
...hills, Che felt at home for the first time in his life. Castro quickly made him a lieutenant. Survival meant keeping constantly on the move, and Che ruthlessly goaded his men into motion. During the day he was the merciless martinet, intolerant of weakness and inspiringly confident. In the evening he taught tactics and the use of weapons, read to his men from Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Venezuelan novelist (and ex-President) Romulo Gallegos, or recited Pablo Neruda's Communist poetry from memory. As they proved themselves in battle, his men proudly christened themselves...