Word: napoleons
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...building now to institutionalize the point. Back in the halcyon haze of the '20s and '30s maisons de tolérance such as the Sphinx, the Chabanais and above all the One-Two-Two (for 122 Rue de Provence) were Parisian tourist attractions outranking the Louvre and Napoleon's tomb. During World War II, however, the bordellos disintegrated in quality-the Gestapo used them as intelligence sources-and in 1946, Marthe Richard, a municipal council member, led a successful campaign to outlaw all houses of prostitution in France. Exercising the eternal prerogative, she has since changed...
...NAPOLEON believed that any Augustus can create a Vergil; any man with sufficient money, he thought, can underwrite a poet to sing his praises. Napoleon also proved that his own thesis is wrong, for what poet created an epic about the Corsican dictator? What Bonaparte did not realize is that an emperor who would create a Vergil must have not only the wealth, but also the stature, of an Augustus. Great poetry can only be written about great topics, topics which are common and central to the experience of all mankind. Any lesser theme is doomed by its nature...
...Napoleon was not the only one who failed to grasp this essential rule. Eve Merriam, a poet who should know better, has broken it in her latest book, The Nixon Poems. Eve Merriam is no mean poet, and some of her work has been quite first-rate. She is one of the few winners of the Yale Younger Poets Prize who have ever been heard from again. This latest collection fails miserably, however, because of its subject, not its author. No great poetry can be written about Richard Nixon, for he is not important to men or to mankind...
...Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets," said Napoleon. "Politicians and political types invariably regard the press as an implacable enemy," President Johnson's onetime press secretary, George E. Reedy, told an audience of Princeton University students last week. A U.S. President "tends to view attacks upon himself as attacks upon the country," said Reedy. "L.B.J. could pull out a mental file drawer in which he had catalogued every major sin by anyone who had ever held a pencil...
...finally sapped Arab power. Portuguese sailors discovered new routes to the Orient around Africa; Arab ports and customhouses ceased to be significant in world trade. Asian marauders kept Arab armies on the defensive. By the 16th century, the Arabs had fallen under the sway of the Ottoman Empire. After Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and later the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, they were dominated by a succession of Western European colonial nations. All that remained for the Arabs was religion, language and hope...