Word: penniless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Joseph Stalin had much to celebrate; he also had much to remember. When he was born, the son of a drunken Georgian shoemaker and his peasant wife, Queen Victoria was on the throne, Karl Marx was a penniless scribbler, and the world seemed to find it a good deal easier to tell the difference between right & wrong than it does today. Stalin built an empire of a kind that Victoria could not have visualized even in her nightmares; he forged Marx's foggy philosophy into an iron knife with which to carve the earth; and he swamped mankind with...
...greengrocers into supplying fruits and vegetables. She collected old clothes, rushed an Estonian mother to a maternity ward just in time (twins), and browbeat the government into giving the refugees an unused army camp for their stay. Cork's taxi drivers even sacrificed good fares to take the penniless voyagers by the carload up to kiss the Blarney Stone...
Spain's stooped and shriveled Juan March has come a long way since the days of his penniless youth when he earned his first pesetas by smuggling tobacco. He did not learn to read or write until his late 40s, but he had a flair for figures. He multiplied his first stake into a fortune (estimated at $100 million to $200 million), gained mastery over scores of Spain's chief industries and banks, and helped finance Franco's rebellion...
...Ignominy made him stand up for the first time ("When I was a boy I was a coward, and bitterly ashamed of it") and passionately demand respect-not only for himself but for his more humble schoolfellows. Humiliation made him a living example of his thesis that "the professional, penniless younger son classes are the revolutionary element in society: the proletariat is the conservative...
Tacho's fat-pig policy was paying off. For diehard Nicaraguan exiles, the legion's end meant that nothing short of a thunderbolt could now topple Tacho. Homesick and penniless, they had begun drifting back to make their peace with the porky dictator. He was glad to see them: "I want all Nicaraguans home. I like to have 'em close, so I can keep an eye on them, bless...