Word: swiss
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
DIED. Felix Bloch, 77, Swiss-born U.S. physicist who shared the 1952 Nobel Prize with American Edward Purcell for the study of nuclear magnetic resonance, a method of measuring the frequencies of signals emitted by atomic nuclei under the influence of radio waves in an electromagnetic field; of a heart attack; in Zurich. NMR has revolutionized medical science as a diagnostic method without the ionizing radiation of CAT-scan X rays or painful injections of contrast material...
Simenon's erotic exploits, on the other hand, while undoubtedly extensive, hover in the realm of legend. Six years ago, he boasted to a Swiss interviewer that he had known 10,000 women, 8,000 of them prostitutes. He later revised his estimate to "tens of thousands." Moreover, he professed to see nothing extraordinary in it: "It's quite a normal number-even banal...
Simenon exemplifies the dilemma that nearly any writer poses for a biographer: an outwardly uneventful life combined with a hyperactive imagination. Indeed, a Swiss psychiatric team that studied Simenon for a 1968 article in a medical journal pronounced him a fantasist, incapable of distinguishing truth from lies. In this brisk, commonsensical book, Fenton Bresler, an English lawyer and the legal correspondent for the London Daily Mail, rightly treats his subject as an unreliable witness. But before Bresler is through, his cross-checking of the record forces him to see the novelist as something more: a personality on trial...
Today, at 80, retired from writing fiction, Simenon lives in a Swiss retreat with one of his former household maids. Popular fancy has tended to see him as the model for the benign, pipe-smoking Maigret, but Bresler maintains that the only connection is wish fulfillment. Maigret, with his equanimity, his intuitive sympathy for others, his fidelity to one woman, is the man that Simenon never could be. Less plausibly, Bresler attributes Simenon's "stunted sexuality" to his rejection by, and rebellion against, the formidably dour widowed mother he left behind in Liège. (When Simenon...
...available as a tool. The key element in that discovery was the baby's desire to imitate its mother's facial movements. Jean Piaget, the celebrated Swiss psychologist who pioneered in this field with extended studies of his own three children, declared that such imitations began only at about eight to twelve months. Earlier than that, he reasoned, the baby could not understand that its own face was similar to that of its mother...