Word: remorselessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gathered in a dining room devoid of servants, ate "exquisite" food and wine that was pushed into the room through a hatch. At the ringing of another bell, "moral and philosophical readings" began, continuing until another bell sent everyone to bed. Peace reigned until, at 4 a.m. sharp, the remorseless bell tolled anew-to announce "a poetry reading." Voltaire and his Emilie lived together with only occasional breaks for 16 astonishing years. Their uninhibited quarrels and their nonstop intellectual creativity made one of the spectacles of the 18th century-and only now has their menage had the brilliant attention...
...much inhumanity can a man bear to inflict on his fellow men before his conscience calls a halt? The answer to this question is the substance of a harrowing little novel from Holland that combines the impact of a documentary film with the prodding of a remorseless sermon. The scene is Westerbork, a concentration camp in occupied Holland, from which Jews were sent on to Auschwitz, Sobibor and other extermination centers in Eastern Europe. The book's real heroes and villains are Jews, while the Nazis are seen only as almost impersonal agents of evil...
...enraged when his father accepted a peerage, which he foresaw would banish him into the "political ghetto'' of the House of Lords and prevent him from becoming Prime Minister (TIME, Sept. 30). Now Viscount Hailsham, Lord President of the Council, chairman of the Conservative Party and a remorseless Tory, Hogg was asked on a BBC show if he, though a member of the House of Lords, could hope to become Prime Minister. "Nobody but a fool," his lordship blurted, "would want to be Prime Minister...
...other wreckage for a moment." "My pleasures are music, conversation, the grapple of my intelligence with fresher ones. All this I can sweeten with a kiss, but I cannot saturate and spoil it with fifty thousand . . . Beware. When all the love has gone out of me, I am remorseless; I hurl the truth about like destroying lightning." Upshot: Alice Lockett married a physician...
Either way, Mauriac's point is as somber, remorseless and debatable as his novel, i.e., that the saints have only one reward at the hands of the world, and even of its professing Christians: to be killed by the poor sinning things they love...