Word: prussia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...high cost of their favors. None more so than La Belle Otero, with her jet-black hair, hourglass figure and enameled complexion. One night at the Café de Paris, five rulers of Europe offered homage at her table-Russia's Nicholas II, Britain's Edward VII, Prussia's Wilhelm II, Belgium's Leopold II and Spain's Alfonso XIII. Otero boasted, "I have been a slave to my passions, but never...
...colorful airing. Leonov, now 30, was born in the village of Listvyanka in the Kuznetsk coal-mining region of Siberia, where his mother earned the Order of Maternal Glory, First Class, for her family of nine. In 1948 his parents moved to Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg in East Prussia), which had been abandoned by its German masters...
...chub-cheeked country boy, with sly blue eyes, reddish-blond hair and a face, as he described it, "like a young girl with a bit of a moustache." Such was the appearance of the greatest German of his time. Otto von Bismarck made Prussia dominant in Germany and Germany dominant in Europe. He has inspired a shelf of biographies but remains essentially a riddle. Was he a selfless hero or a scheming tyrant...
Bismarck was quite a bit of both but, above all, a much misjudged figure, argues Werner Richter, a German biographer who has written books on everyone from Ludwig II to Abraham Lincoln. Instead of painting Bismarck black or white-Prussia's royal colors-Richter sees him as an eminently human creature given to occasional flirtation, frequent psychosomatic ailments, fits of weeping, and almost constant self-doubt. For 30 years, the man who first said that "politics is the art of the possible" manipulated the events of a continent simply because he knew how to manipulate people. The Iron Chancellor...
...Kaiser had inexcusably affronted the French ambassador. Result: France felt compelled to declare war, and Germany conquered Alsace-Lorraine. While his generals were mounting history's first blitzkrieg, the Chancellor condemned their "criminal" sacrifice of manpower. He called their tactics "all fists and no head" and remarked that Prussia's only worthwhile militarists had been trained abroad...