Word: scratchings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...young party recruits : their initiation into Nazi-type brutality. Scared and disgusted, one starts to stutter, another has an attack of diarrhea, a third gouges his eye. An orphan, reminded of his parents' grave, tears up the cemetery more ferociously than anyone else, "as though he wanted to scratch the buried bones out of the ground...
...between Bohlen and John Foster Dulles; the Secretary of State paid little heed to his ambassador's advice about the Russians. In 1957, against Bohlen's wishes, President Dwight Eisenhower pulled him out of Moscow and made him Ambassador to the Philippines. There, though he started from scratch, Bohlen did a typically professional job, helped maintain U.S. -Philippine ties at a time when the island nation was trying to become less dependent on its old supporter and ally...
Counting Socks. Separated from its only friend in the world, Red China, by 3,000 miles, Albania lives in an isolation both defiant and pathetic. More than 70% of its 1,700,000 people scratch a living from the collectivized soil; most of Albania's farm villages and mountain towns have changed little in the last century. Garbage flows through an open gutter cut in the middle of narrow streets; hawk-nosed men sip Turkish coffee in dim cafés while their women shoulder heavy loads of wood and barrels of scarce water. Along with the traditional poverty...
Empson's endless explications are often ingenious, just as often capricious. "Unexplained beauty always arouses an interest in me," Empson once irreverently wrote, "a sense that this could be a good place to scratch." By close analysis, Empson has washed away many misreadings of poetry; by showing how varied and inventive poets are, he has often made them more exciting. But he may also frighten off readers who translate his lesson as: if you think you understand a poem, there is something wrong with you−or the poem. As a result, many a reader has felt that poetry...
...Virginia's accounts are godly; she recalls that "Oscar Sargent bet me my whole bag of gumdrops that Miss Nelly McDonnell's cat couldn't scratch himself out if we buried him. I bet he could. But if he could, he didn't. Oscar says to me. he says 'What do people do with dead bodies?' " Still, she is a properly brought up little girl, and she ends every chapter with a prayer. The one that closes the chapter about her garden party (at which the bishop drank a triple julep and she danced...