Word: pickax
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...summer afternoon in 1940, a gaunt young man entered the suburban Mexico City villa of Leon Trotsky, and asked for criticism of a manuscript. Trotsky invited him into his study, where the young man smashed an Alpine pickax down on Trotsky's skull. The dying man's screams brought two bodyguards on the run; they knocked the assassin down, kicked him nearly unconscious. Cried Trotsky: "Don't kill him. This man has a story to tell...
Swinging a Pickax. Last year, with the Leeds area short of several hundred teachers, Educator Taylor hit on the sound idea that people in their 30s and 40s might like to switch careers. He aimed at restless mothers of teen-aged children, at bright older men with dull jobs who "feel quite desperate because their lives are being wasted." Britain's Ministry of Education pooh-poohed the idea, but Taylor persisted with a plan to set up a two-year college in a grimy, abandoned Leeds school building. This fall the unenthusiastic ministry finally agreed, and Taylor...
...archaeological digs. Others were just as hungry for academic pursuits, though a bit rusty. Most needed help in such forgotten arts as ordering their thoughts in a coherent essay. "At the beginning," recalls Principal Thomas Hollins, "they acted as if they were trying to paint a picture with a pickax...
...glittering balls in London's Marlborough House, yachting at Cowes and the stately bacchanals of the Rue de Tilsitt. It was a time when men grabbed for the main chance, when the difference between obscurity and unfathomable wealth could simply be the lucky stroke of a pickax. If John or Louise Mackay had a thought beyond material success, the book does not suggest it. They knew what they wanted and were content when they got it, even though Louise may have partially agreed with Mrs. Paran Stevens, who said to her: "Odd, isn't it, how hard...
Fiercely mustachioed General Nader Batmanghelich, chief of staff of the Iranian army, raised a pickax one day last week and brought it down hard on one of the highest domes in Teheran. This ceremonial blow dramatized the Iranian government's outlawing of the Bahai religion in the land where it was born and began the conversion of Bahai national headquarters into a secular building. All over the world, from the lakeside gentility of Chicago to Israel's port city of Haifa, Bahai voices rose in protest...