Word: paroxysm
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...sunlight refracted on a palazzo ceiling from the Grand Canal. She grips the hand of her grandson Giorgio and thanks him for his visit ("Now the whole family has come"). But Giorgio, incorrigibly honest, utters a long-banished name: "One of your sons, Marco, is not here." In a paroxysm of coughing, the old lady dies...
Unimpressive in appearance but steely cold in personality, Liu boldly accused Peng of "bureaucratism," so overawed the burly soldier that ex-Bandit Peng went into a paroxysm of selfcriticism. Even his close association with Mao's archopponent within the party, Stalinist Li Lisan, did not halt Liu's rise. Thanks to his gift for translating Mao's sweeping ideas into explicit political handbooks, Liu's "literary" works (How to Be a Good Communist, On the Party Struggle) became must reading for all Chinese Communists...
...political paroxysm shaking all Africa has even sent tremors into the calm heartland of the Congo. Last year Belgium permitted limited elections for the first time, and 13 black and five white mayors took office. Settled in modernistic offices, well paid, and furnished with chauffeur-driven Opel sedans, the African mayors were supposed to act as agents of Belgian authority. Instead, some assumed the old prerogatives of tribal chiefs and seized firm political control of the native communes. Recently African intellectuals in Léopoldville united to form the Congo's first native political party, with...
...habit to "lie somewhat torpidly on the banks of the parliamentary stream. I once spent some time in the tropics ... I noticed the crocodile, the king of the tropical rivers, lying in the mud, apparently inattentive to what was going on but, if excited, springing up and, in a paroxysm of rage, lashing his tail and extending his giant jaws-a very formidable creature indeed." Millikin answered: "I do not mind being compared to the crocodile. If I were not in a pleasant mood, I might think of even more obnoxious animals with which to compare the Senator from Illinois...
...Blueprint for Murder, Actor Cotten pushes his mannerism to the point where he seems to undergo a paroxysm of Angst every time he decides to put one foot in front of another. To some extent, Cotten's anxiety is understandable: he has reason to believe that his brother and his niece were murdered by his brother's second wife (Jean Peters), but he cannot prove anything, and neither can the police. , In a desperate attempt to keep the woman from poisoning his brother's other child, Gotten poisons her first-with a tablet of strychnine he found...