Word: tartaric
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...enough in these pages to explain why Hopkins was feared and hated by men of all parties. Noting that Harry "was addicted to the naked insult," Sherwood quotes Hugh Johnson without disapproval : "He has a mind like a razor, a tongue like a skinning knife, a temper like a Tartar and a sufficient vocabulary of parlor profanity-words kosher enough to get by the censor but acid enough to make a mule-skinner jealous . . . He's just a highminded Holy Roller in a semi-religious frenzy...
...most memorable of moon festivals occurred in the bitter years when Tartar invaders ruled the land. Revolt brewed against them in 1368. To break it, the alien despots posted guards in the foremost Chinese households. When the feast-day came, families gathered and all went as usual-until mooncakes were served. When the feasters broke into the pastries, they found slips of paper with the message: "Kill the Tartars in your household." All rose in mighty unison. The aliens were driven forth and the peace of the Mings descended on China...
This week, as another autumn moon lit up the traditional festival, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek summoned his countrymen to rise against another kind of Tartar in the national household. "We should understand," he cried in a broadcast to the people, "that in addition to the treacherous rebels who are rampant today, speculation, manipulation and high living to the point of lasciviousness on the part of social parasites in our midst are also to blame for our crisis ... It is my intention to wash away these social dregs by opening the floodgates of public conscience and social justice...
Admirers of Soviet cinematic exports to recently appear in this country will find "Ivan The Terrible" a characteristic product, replete with the usual recurring armies of Russian extras either besieging a Tartar castle with catapults or recovering Stalingrad with bazookas. Sergei Eisenstein, who introduced wartime American audiences to Russian military history with "Alexander Nevsky" and "Suvarov," has again probed into his country's past to come up with "Ivan The Terrible" in the process of fashioning the Duchy of Moscow into all the Russias...
...series of historical tapestries, "Ivan The Terrible" nevertheless remains impressive entertainment. If the episodic nature of the narrative is admitted, each individual sequence has independent unity of pace. The coronation of young Ivan, the sacking of Tartar Kazan, a deathbed scene which ably reproduces the oriental mysticism of medieval Russian Christianity, and the loneliness of Ivan's old age as his princes desert to the jackals baying around his borders--all these make striking individual images. Unfortunately, they are strung together in ponderous disunity and confusion...