Word: tyrant
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When a Hollywood type says, "I see you've been to Sebring," he doesn't mean the sports-car races. He is talking about Jay Sebring, 28, the Alabama-born boy who has become dictator of the nape-line, tyrant of the sideburn, and keeper of the keys to baldpate for a list of notables that begins with Frank Sinatra and ends with Bobby Darin (they have a similar problem) and includes Milton Berle, Marlon Brando and Sammy Davis...
...appetites, appeased at drunken, all-night banquets. Before one such repast, at Stalin's villa outside Moscow. Djilas met Molotov in the basement toilet. Explained the Foreign Minister: "We call this unloading before loading." The book's big point is not that Stalin was a revolting tyrant, but that the Communist system permitted and encouraged him to be one. Even "destalinization." suggests Djilas, has not changed the nature of Communism. He writes: "The essence of the problem is not whether this group is better than that, but that they should exist at all-and whether the ideological...
Raised in the tyrant's shadow, Vasily made the worst of it, demanded and got the same fawning servility he saw heaped upon Stalin. Despite special tutors, he was an indifferent student. Only flying seemed to interest the short (5 ft. 3 in.), slim, red-haired youth, and in 1941 he finally got his wings. In the air Vasily won the reputation of a daredevil pilot; during the postwar years, he occupied a lavish, heavily guarded 30-room villa at Dallgow, near Potsdam, earned notoriety as caring only for drink and women. Partial to cruel practical jokes, he enjoyed...
Frederick the Great of Prussia, who called himself "the first servant of the state," was as much a tyrant as any monarch of the 18th century, but he liked to say of himself that he was "philosopher by instinct and politician by duty." He was also a patron of the arts. He played the flute to the accompaniment of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons; he wrote indifferent poetry under the tutelage of his sometime friend Voltaire; he was an avid collector of paintings and sculpture. In affairs of state, he was Prussian to the bone...
...Burned Alive." Sometimes the dictator himself took a hand in the proceedings. Carlos M. Nolasco, a former sergeant implicated in a 1959 air force conspiracy, tells of Trujillo's arriving one night at Nine to deal with eight officers arrested after the plot was broken. Says Nolasco: "The tyrant ordered the compromised officers burned alive." Other survivors tell of a ferocious murder binge immediately after Trujillo's assassination by a band of gunmen last May. Literally scores of people were horribly tortured and killed. Among the victims: General Rene Roman Fernandez, an in-law of Trujillo and secretary...