Word: tyrant
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...administrative skills were those "of a backwoods barrister," says Newman, describing weeks of fran tic search by Diefenbaker's staff for a letter from President Eisenhower - a hunt that ended when Diefenbaker found the letter under his own bed. In Cabinet meetings, says Newman, Diefenbaker acted the tyrant, treating his colleagues like a "delinquent scout troop," refusing to allow smoking and demanding unanimity on all questions...
Presumably to show he is not a total tyrant, Ne Win released three former Cabinet ministers (but not ex-Premier U Nu) from house arrest. Unless the army stages a coup, Ne Win may muddle along indefinitely. "It's not the Burmese way to man the barricades," explained a Rangoon educator. "Given our plentiful food supplies and the passivity of the people, it's possible for someone to misrule Burma for perhaps a decade before incurring true wrath...
...wanted, Louis XIV got-in art as well as in life. In payment he gave royal protection, and no one basked more deliciously in the Sun King's rays than Charles Le Brun, "First Painter of the King" and for 20 years the absolute arbiter and benevolent tyrant of le bon gout français. Swept into museum storerooms as succeeding generations downgraded 17th century classicism, Le Brun has been rehabilitated this summer in an almost too complete exhibition at the Château de Versailles...
...sent a message to the 20th Party Congress lavishly praising the dead dictator. Without bothering to consult the Chinese, Khrushchev delivered his famed "secret speech" to the Congress, in which he suddenly unmasked Stalin as a megalomaniacal tyrant. Peking was stunned. Mao felt-correctly, as was proved a few months later by the uprisings in Poland and Hungary-that the destalinization drive would touch off a wave of unrest. Even though Stalin had bullied and betrayed the Chinese Communists (as well as helped them, at a price, during the Korean war), Mao believed in Stalin's principle of centralized...
...that houses medieval treasures, it conveys a sense of perfect and untarnished work from a hand long since turned to dust. But it came through only by luck: a large proportion of contemporaneous objects of art made of precious metal was later melted down to provide some prince or tyrant with funds for a now-forgotten...