Word: recant
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...science were far from cordial. The four young men who met in a Roman palace in 1603 to organize the accademia were taking a considerable chance. And trouble came quickly. In 1633, Galileo Galilei, most famous of the Lynxes, was picked up by the Inquisition and compelled to recant his heretical notion that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo's condemnation broke the academy's spirit, and for more than a century it was hardly more than a library. In 1795, the academy was revived, only to be suppressed in 1840 by Pope Gregory...
...people, petty bourgeois washed out of their lairs by the Revolution." It was in fact the opposite: a memorable attack on a system that crushed both the flesh and spirit of humanity. After Olesha published several other works, the commissars took a second look, and he was forced to recant...
Perhaps the strangest episode in his strange life came just before Gage decided to recant. Although he pleads throughout his narrative against "Popish superstitions"-including prayers to the saints-he nevertheless made a pilgrimage to Loreto to test his strength as heretic. He had already half decided to renounce Rome and become a Protestant. If, he reasoned, he prayed in bad faith before the image of Our Lady of Loreto, surely it would blush or sweat. But the image made not a sign...
...nominal plot is so trite as to be absurd: our hero is a professor who has flunked the football hero before the big game, and our problem is whether or not pressure will force him to recant his decision. Personal factors complicate this moral issue, however, and thus save the book from its anticipated collapse...
When Thomas Dehler, leader of the second-largest party in Adenauer's coalition, demanded "a German foreign policy" and bilateral negotiations with the Russians, Adenauer on his sickbed could not contain himself. He dashed off a letter demanding that Dehler recant and swear allegiance to Adenauer's policy. It was an appalling political error, the first sign that the sick old man was losing his legendary political instinct. Dehler had been slipping, but faced with such a humiliating ultimatum, a majority of his party rallied to him, and deserted the coalition. Adenauer's once-massive 334-vote...