Word: nero
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Dictators' pastimes are far more striking because they often contrast with the rulers' normal behavior. Nero, no fiddler incidentally, did play the lyre and sing to vast, appreciative audiences. Hitler was a painter who started out doing postcard-size works of art and, as his career improved, worked his way up to large water-colors of wartime destruction: rubble, crumbled walls, caved-in roofs. Eventually he created his own subjects, a rare chance for an artist. According to his lackey, the featherbrained Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler also adored whistling. His best numbers were Harvard fight songs, which Putzi...
...show a light heart, however, and has played the accordion at dances. It would be a sad end to so carefree a hobby if Amin were now discovered because someone happened to overhear Lady of Spain. Still, the mind is cheered by the image of Amin on his accordion, Nero on his lyre, Hitler whistling away. Where a band like this would play offers problems, but its repertoire would surely include I've Gotta...
...reach this pinnacle? Ice cream was perfected in the U.S., as all honest chauvinists know, but it was not invented here. Nero liked to eat flavored ice, according to Paul Dickson's scholarly and amusing The Great American Ice Cream Book, and in the 13th century Marco Polo returned from the Orient with a recipe for some sort of frozen dessert with milk in it. Catherine de Medicis appears to have introduced sherbets and ices, possibly ice cream, to France in 1533, when she arrived there with her retinue to marry the future Henry II. Beethoven, during the mild...
...sterling characters ranging from a Cantabrigian historian to a gentleman's gentleman, who almost rates a novel by himself. Young Churchill makes an appearance. The suffragists and the Irish troubles and Kaiser Wilhelm crowd in, sometimes hilariously. Edward VII comes across -accurately-as a spoiled, imperious near Nero who nonetheless had a regal way with bridge, economics and foreign policy. The novel ends in 1914, four years after Edward's death, as the honeyed England of Rupert Brooke's young dreams slides toward the nightmare of Wilfred Owen's trenches...
...your abilities, but I know my size has gotten me jobs." Among actors who might be on any producer's list: Orson Welles, an epic creator who is known to the television generation as the butt of Johnny Carson's fat jokes; William Conrad, TV's Nero Wolfe; Raymond Burr, old Ironside; and Burt Young, the Gibraltar of Rocky. Perhaps the most stereotyped of all is Victor Buono. Fat from childhood, Buono reached 400 Ibs. before a recent diet took him down to 350. He played Bette Davis' father in Hush, Hush'. . . Sweet Charlotte when...