Word: mercilessness
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...hopes, and the merciless way in which her hope is broken is the theme of this moving book. The button-eyes of her shoes, a cracked lithograph of the Sacred Heart, and her aunt's photograph are the familiars of her lonely misery. These possessions symbolize the three elements which transport Judith Hearne to her doom-genteel poverty, a puritan concept of Catholicism, and the aunt who had exploited pity to keep her in domestic servitude...
Novelist Moore, for the most part, lets his characters describe each other with merciless Irish precision. Judith Hearne, alas, is "a boozer," "an ould fraud," and on one "day to end all," she is jostled from her waking daydream by the discovery that the "American" Madden is not rich and does not want to marry her. The only fortune he ever made was compensation for being run down by a city bus, and he wanted the old maid's money to start a "hamburg joint" for Yankee tourists...
...clever, and seconded by implacable old House Speaker Sam Rayburn, was the challenger. The prize: control of the Texas Democratic Party, including its 56-vote delegation to the national convention. Last week, at more than 5,000 precinct meetings in 254 counties, Lyndon Johnson gave Allan Shivers a merciless drubbing, then added a couple of sharp kicks to make certain he would...
...Soviet visit could prove a turning point in Sir Anthony Eden's political fortunes. He gave nothing away and got something back: he may become co-founder of a useful new phase in international affairs. Certainly, his merciless detractors in the Tory press, and among the "Poujadist fringe" of the weeklies, who have always scorned the value of such a visit, are now looking rather silly...
...weeks ago, angered at the Japanese for breaking off peace treaty talks in London, the U.S.S.R. imposed severe controls on Japanese salmon fishing in the Okhotsk Sea, the western Bering Sea and parts of the North Pacific (see map) during the four-month spawning season. The prohibition put a merciless squeeze on Japan's fishing industry, which provides Japan's basic food supply. Aggressive Japanese fishermen once ranged the whole Pacific at will, but Japan now finds herself hemmed in by restricted areas...