Word: simpleton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...account of the exile years, Historian Ralph Korngold reveals the constant bickering and backbiting of the Napoleonic entourage. Napoleon himself, argues Korngold, may have been hounded to a premature death by the erratic restrictions and petty cruelties of the British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, a fussy, indecisive simpleton...
...flew into Léopoldville last week, he got the kind of ugly welcome that France's Premier Guy Mollet once got in Algiers. Angry white settlers shut up their shops in protest, flew flags of mourning, chalked up slogans saying GO HOME, TRAITOR, and SNUL (Flemish for simpleton). Had the irate settlers had any suspicion what energetic little Maurice Van Hemelrijck was about to do. their slogans might have been a good deal nastier than that...
...their mothers love them?). The dreaded Black-and-Tans busily rip the peace of Dublin, while in shivery cold-water attics, rust-thatched idealists plan a land where freedom would be free. An innocuous poet and his cowardly roomie stash some unwanted bombs in the bosom of an ample simpleton; she is torn off screaming by the dreaded Black-and-Tans, executed, and leaves the two with the empty feeling that they've been naughty, somehow, much in the manner young George Washington must have felt...
...This simpleton idea shows up bright and clear, though, because the Brattle has a new projection trick that does away with its infamous flickering gray screen. The weakness, smallness and sunkenness of the Brattle's screen came from the fact that the Brattle wasn't designed as a movie theatre (or indeed as a theatre at all), and the projectors have to be behind the screen instead of over the balcony as in any other theatre. Being behind, the screen image is reversed, and to return the image to normal a prism previously had to be mounted in the projector...
...turn. Gimpel tries, but it is not in him: he is too much the fool even to be evil. The worldly-wise (including the reader) are sharply reproached by Gimpel's foolishness and yet they are also apt to envy it, for it is illuminated by the saintly simpleton's strange, special kind of dignity. Unpretentiously, almost crudely sketched, Gimpel is an unforgettable character, deeply moving in his gentle submission to all blows, his dogged love of a worthless wife, his quiet expectation of the end: "When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there...