Word: pickax
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...near Hanoi, was for a time Ho Chih-minh's headquarters and was recently taken by the French. It is the most utterly destroyed place since Lidice. Perhaps it is worse. Every building was burned or wrecked before the Viet Minh left. A favorite method is taking a pickax and weakening around the window frames of brick walls until they collapse...
...clothes, his theatrical trick of cocking his head and firing wisecracks. He killed a Pure Book Bill with a line: "No woman was ever ruined by a book." Once, after listening to an interminable political speech about subways, he rose and cried: "For digging subways, sir, you need a pickax, not a thorax...
...during the first attempt against Trotsky). But the assassin, allegedly an agent of the NKVD (Russian Secret Police), arrived in broad daylight, introduced to Trotsky's circle in the guise of a friend. One day as Trotsky sat reading a paper, this friend, Frank Jackson,*produced a small pickax (such as mountain climbers use), smashed Trotsky's skull and crunched into what a moment before had been one of the 20th Century's most exciting minds...
...ghost had merely been laid, not silenced. The pen was still mightier than the pickax. From the crematorium, Trotsky hurled a last indictment. For he had left behind, two thirds completed, the rest in rather full notes, a devastating political biography of his archenemy...
...Comrade Trotsky never finished explaining what "the idea had." For at that point in history, ideas, to which Trotsky was dedicated, were shattered forever by the force which Stalin epitomized. Before Trotsky could complete his sentence, Jackson's pickax had written finis to "the grand polemic" and the grander polemicist...