Word: motivelessly
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...shows up in the jerky diction of the first stories, "Over 4000 Square Miles" and "The Return," which bristle with the odd, awkwardly-placed "nevertheless" and "moreover" and sentences like. "At last Rucker understood that all the sensations of his long experience had this night joined together in a motiveless musical triumph that was almost violent." In such over-intense passages, one conjures up Domini teetering on chair-edge, biting his nails at the typewriter...
...Lady Macbeth-to-be, Tamora seethes with ambition and an acrid hatred of Titus, who had her eldest son killed in a ritual sacrifice. When she takes Aaron (Errol Slue), a Moor, for her lover, the carnage begins. Despite his color, Aaron is Iago's twin in his motiveless malignity. He plots to have Titus' daughter Lavinia (Goldie Semple) raped, and her hands cut off and her tongue ripped out. Then the heads of two of Titus' murdered sons are unshrouded before the father. In retaliation, Titus stabs two of Tamora's sons to death...
...about the English young: "They've got enough food, sexual freedom and indoor toilets. Why the deuce aren't they happy?" West German terrorists are especially difficult to fathom because ideologically they travel light, somewhat like the turn-of-the-century Russian anarchists called bezmo-tivniki (motiveless ones). Says Martin Greiffenhagen, a political scientist at the University of Stuttgart: "Behind the acts of terror stands neither revolutionary theory nor strategy." The American radicals who blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin seven years ago had Viet Nam for a rationale. The West German...
Tarden isn't always the perpetrator of Cockpit's atrocities. Sometimes, as in Steps, he is only a witness; occasionally he is the victim. Once in a while, in his apparently motiveless interference in people's lives, he does them a good turn. In the process, we don't learn very much about him. He has an apparently limitless amount of money, and an extraordinary intelligence for survival (he boasts of this). He describes some of his past in a sketchy and idealized way: he managed by cunning to escape from a totalitarian, evidently EasternEuropean state; in the United States...
...Motiveless malignancy, as represented by Bernard, surely exists in the world. Old age is no guarantee of wisdom or largeness of spirit. But somewhere before a surprise ending with more deaths than Act V of Hamlet, it becomes evident that Author Amis is enjoying his caricatured geriatricks in some way that might be appropriate to Goneril and Regan in King Lear but is simply hateful in Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. Graham Greene once wrote that when trying to refine the pangs and foibles of men and women into fiction, a novelist must have a sliver of ice in his heart...