Word: swindler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Krull, Thomas Mann tried to avoid that tension by laughing-ironically, a little pedantically, but joyously, too-at human folly. For he really liked his confidence man; he saw in him the world's need for illusion, exemplified by a swindler's tricks as much as by a monarch's pomp and an artist's fictions. The last lines he committed to publication are a rollicking apostrophe to life that few other men of 80-or 40-could have written: "A whirlwind of primordial forces seized and bore me into the realm of ecstasy. And high...
They were reading Mann once again in Germany. A new novel, a wryly ironic account of a gifted swindler (based on an old sketch), was having a great success. Last March his home town, Lübeck, which had once resented Buddenbrooks, made him an honorary citizen. In May in Stuttgart he opened the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Poet-Dramatist Friedrich von Schiller. Almost in spite of himself, Mann had become a symbol of German unity. His 80th birthday in June was the occasion for celebrations in the Western world, but none so satisfactory...
...confidence-man gently chides the old fellow, "since in Providence, as in man, you and I equally put trust." "Let me extinguish this lamp," he says, and as he leads the old man off into the darkness, the confidence-man is no longer a smooth-talking Iago turned riverboat swindler, but the Devil himself holding the whole earth in his black hand...
...suggestion of panic. Three days after Mrs. Petrov was rescued from the Russians at Darwin, the Russian government abruptly severed diplomatic relations with Australia. In one breath, the Russians accused the Australians of "slander" for calling Petrov a spy, and in the next, demanded his immediate return as a swindler and embezzler. Unable to get back the documents delivered to Australia by Petrov, the departing staff at Canberra's Russian embassy spent their last hours getting rid of other information that might prove valuable to the West. Black smoke belched from the embassy chimneys as files went into fireplaces...
...stink began to rise three months ago when a Korean confidence man named Masutomi Ito was arrested for bilking thousands of small investors of some $3,000,000 in an investment-trust racket. Swindler Ito spent part of his plunder on such delicacies as broiled eels in Tokyo and an expensive mistress in Kyoto. He admitted that he had continued to solicit funds even after his investment company had gone bankrupt, blandly told police: "If this constitutes fraud, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do about...