Word: mercilessness
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...piano manufacturer, Rolfe became a Roman Catholic convert at 26, studied for the priesthood but was expelled from his seminary in Rome. For the rest, he was a weirdly gifted writer, schoolmaster, painter, photographer, workhouse inmate, homosexual, paranoiac, and perhaps the most merciless autobiographer ever to snarl at his own image. In his famed, partly autobiographical novel, Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe created a fantasy in which the College of Cardinals chooses as Pope an expelled English novice (like himself) who reforms the church and the world, and dies a martyr. In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Rolfe told...
Rupp's success at Kentucky is traceable to indefatigable recruiting, and a merciless concentration on perfection of fundamentals. Admits the Baron: "Of course, we get good boys here at Kentucky. Every boy in the state, from the time he's born, lives for the day he can play at the university." Once Rupp gets his players, he drills them endlessly and without letup. They live together in the same dormitory, eat a special diet. Practices are conducted in semi-silence, save for an occasional tongue-lashing directed by Rupp at a player who is not giving...
...woman was a moneylender, but Peter Fury's crime was different from that of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov. He did not kill out of pride but from shame and pity. He had been marked for the priesthood by his mother, and her merciless determination to pay for his education had led him not to the altar, but to the loan shark's table. After getting out of prison, he finds that all the members of his family have died or been scattered. He lives on in a desolation of scene and spirit that the French, under the fashionable...
...indeed, is perhaps the most notable feature of Nigeria's educational system. Fear of losing a government scholarship is, however, only one explanation for this phenomenon. Another is the simple fact that there are not enough schools for everyone; hence, only those most qualified may attend. This involves a merciless elimination of the intellectually unfit. The process begins early. The principal of a secondary school in Onitsha told me that 900 boys applied this year to his school; the number was reduced to 180 after competitive examinations, and of these 60 were finally selected. The principal of Government College...
...AbdelKader, the handsome, 25-year-old son of a holy man, they launched a jihad (holy war) to expel the infidel. French General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, a veteran of Napoleon's Spanish campaign, where the word guerrilla was invented, responded with a tactic called the razzia -a swift, merciless strike at a native village, sparing nothing and nobody. In one razzia, in 1845, nearly 500 Algerian men, women and children were asphyxiated by fires lit at the mouth of a cave in which they had taken refuge. After 15 years of this kind of warfare, Abdel Kader finally surrendered...