Word: sworde
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...play is a kind of twilit allegory, a heroic drama that beats its swords into similes a work whose verbal abundance begets theatrical poverty. Brief scenes excepted, the play is most interesting where philosophically it is least so: in the first act where the situation is forged, where there is some of the clang of cloak-and-sword drama, where the words still fly upward. Thereafter, when they attempt to go inward, they suggest not a scalpel but an embroidery needle. Moreover, Fry is so unsimple with language that he can never really be complex about people. His deserter...
...14th century conspirators surged into the palace bellowing, "Death to the tyrant!" Count Fosca (the tyrant in question) whipped out his sword and skewered the ringleader. Seconds later, Fosca felt "a sharp pain between my ribs," but instead of dropping down dead, he only spitted another brace of gizzards. Three hundred years later, the same Count Fosca "shot myself in the chest and then in the mouth"; 300 years after that, still going strong, he drew a razor across his throat, but "the lips of the gash [drew] together...only a long pink scar remained...
...Your Jan. 10 article "The Pistol and the Claw" raises some interesting questions. Will we learn in time that those who live by the sword inevitably perish by it ? An alternative was suggested several thousand years ago, namely, "doing unto others as we would have them do unto us." Impractical? May be so, but it works. The hardest of criminals will respond favorably to such treatment when genuine and done in the absence of a "big stick" behind one's back...
...brought a new trick to desert fighting. Between lines of trucks he strung electrified wires, then drove the sword-swinging Senussi horsemen into the electric net. He rounded up 80,000 noncombatant men, women and children, and put them in concentration camps. In pursuit of the Senussi he sent "flying tribunals," which tortured their captives, hung them in bags from tall trees and dropped them out of airplanes. When Senussi Chief Omar El Muktar surrendered and asked for the status of a forgiven enemy, Graziani had him shot as a bandit...
...Samuel 20:9-10, describing the meeting of Joab and Amasa at the great stone of Gibeon: "And Joab said to Amasa, Art thou in health, my brother? And Joab took Amasa by the beard with the right hand to kiss him. But Amasa took no heed to the sword that was in Joab's hand: so he [Joab] smote him therewith in the fifth...