Word: ruthlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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White soon became a forbidding figure at Treasury. A stocky little man with a cropped brush mustache that twitched when he was nervous, he lunged around the corridors with a jerky gait. He was a ruthless martinet with subordinates, bluntly critical of those he considered his intellectual inferiors-and that included just about everyone. He was intolerant: a man who opposed Harry White was likely to fall under suspicion of being "pro-Nazi." He worked and schemed constantly, slept and played little. Said one of his associates: "He ranged everywhere, like a waterbug...
14th Century Rome (Bettina Colonna, by Michel Durafour; Bobbs-Merrill). A souped-up account of the meteoric political rise and fall of Cola di Rienzo (fact), and how lovely, ruthless Bettina won and lost him (fiction), enlivened by pre-Renaissance skulduggery and dalliance...
Gently Does It (by Janet Green) is distinctly English playvvriting, less distinctly any one kind of English play. Sufficient murder is contemplated and committed to label it a thriller, and its chief character is ruthless and psychotic enough to be a proper basis for thrills. But Edward Bare is so set on getting on in life through wealthy women that the play-all the more for being talky-seems less concerned with crime than mere careerism...
Freud refused to let Martha meet her previous boy friends. "Woe to him if he becomes my enemy," he growled of one of them. "I am made of harder stuff than he is . . . I can be ruthless." He ordered her to stop the practices of religion (orthodox Judaism), to "change her fondness for being on good terms with everybody," to realize that henceforth she belonged only to Freud and must invariably take his side. He rebuked her for having gone "aside to pull up your stockings" while they were taking a walk, and refused her permission to ice-skate...
...President was unspectacular Celal Bayar, an able banker and one of Ataturk's ministers for five years, his Premier for one. This peaceful transfer of power was not the millennium, but it was the closest approach to it in the Middle East. Ataturk's 15 years of ruthless education and preparation had paid...