Word: sordidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scenes have the faithfulness and the feeling of fine color plates in a history book-King Philip's drunken dance among the corpses at Chaeronea, the hurling of the spear into Asia, the symbolic blow at the navel of a continent when Alexander cut the Gordian knot, the sordid grandeur of Darius' doom, the murder of Cleitus in a childish...
...warning to the overeager, Classicist Jotham Johnson of New York University posted a special memo in the classics department last week. "The sordid rumor has been promulgated," he wrote, "that March 15, 1956 is the 2,000th anniversary of those Ides of March on which CJ. Caesar was assassinated. This results from an inaccurate or hasty computation, for March 15, 44 B.C. to March 15, 1 B.C. equals only 43 years; March 15, 1 B.C. to March 15, 1 A.D. equals one year. (There was no zero year.) March 15, 1 A.D. to March 15, 1956 makes a total, then...
...detail the last hours of a prosperous pimp, and introduces as ugly a set of murder suspects as the season has offered. The case is tackled by Inspector Schmidt of New York Homicide, whose homey habit of taking off his pinching shoes in moments of stress somehow makes the sordid details of the crime seem more wholesome...
...poetry. But they too cannot remain alone in the fog or in the clubs and bars very long, but are drawn back to the white-haired woman, once beautiful, who is their wife and mother, and their grief. And when they return to the house, to unhappiness and sordid squabbling, she is glad: "I was so relieved and happy when you came, and grateful to you. It's very dreary and sad to be here alone in the fog with night falling...
After wayward young (20) Mail-Order Heir Montgomery Ward Thorne mysteriously died in a shabby Chicago apartment (TIME, July 26, 1954) amid the sordid evidence of a sex-and-drug orgy, his will, drawn up only nine days before his death, soon sparked a bitter court battle. It left only a quarter of his $1,800,000 estate to his mother and an aunt, three-quarters to his pretty fiancee, Maureen Ragen, and her mother. Last week a Chicago court threw out the will on the ground that fear-ridden Thorne was not legally competent when he made...