Word: sword
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...feud is heated up again. It culminates in a six-man battle on a beach by the bleak northern sea that is like some scene from the Morte d'Arthur. Heads are stricken from shoulders and go bouncing down the sand; bodies are spitted on spear and sword. The effect is stately as a tapestry, stylized as a morality play...
...addition, amnesty is a vital precondition for negotiations on other issues. We cannot negotiate with a sword over our heads. Without amnesty, we run the risk that any formal concessions we win will be short-lived, politically empty and easily betrayed...
...awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then-to learn." -The Sword in the Stone...
This passage from the ringing first novel in T. H. White's Arthurian cycle, The Once and Future King, is a shade too piteous to be in character. The Sword in the Stone comes so near to being a perfect book that the momentary faltering in Merlyn's tone is worth examining. In her compassionate biography of White, Author Sylvia Townsend Warner suggests that it was White himself who missed his love, who lay at night listening to the roar of his veins, and who swallowed great draughts of learning as a painkiller...
...diaries. His biographer, who never met him, overstates his seeming ease of production; in her portrait, he is an amiable but absent-mirded fowl who every now and then discovers that he has produced an egg. At any rate, in 1938, at the age of 32, White produced The Sword in the Stone, an evocation of "the 12th century or whenever it was," written as if remembered. It was without much question the best book for a twelve-year-old ever written, and a haunting delight for readers of any age. Besides unfolding the entire panoply of medieval life...