Word: redoubtable
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tower behind their house. In a neighborhood of housing-development bungalows, it is an astonishing sight. Marilyn Durham says that when Eleanor Perry writes to her describing things like the purple mountains of Monaco, "I sigh and look out at the clothesline." But she is gazing from an Elizabethan redoubt...
...tradition of Mafia warfare, a tactic like lifting the drawbridge in a medieval Italian castle town. Last week about 20 members of the Gallo mob were dug in near Joey's old headquarters, a store front on Brooklyn's President Street, just across the street from the redoubt they occupied during the 1961-62 Gallo-Profaci war. If they have followed their practice from those days, they have nailed chicken wire over the windows, to prevent hand grenades from being lobbed in. In such campaigns, security is tight. Sentries are posted on nearby streets to watch for strangers...
...Better than Swapping. These practitioners believe very strongly in polygamy as God's law. They must: polygamy is no redoubt for the lickerish. "Prayer is 99% of our existence, if not 100%," the pressman explains. "If a person goes into this principle who is selfish, lustful or jealous, it will make a devil out of him." Whatever his spiritual resources, though, the man with three wives has serious worldly problems. Just the simple recreational act of going to a drive-in movie has potential for domestic havoc. "We fight over who will sit by him," says one wife...
Last Stronghold. There is also an older precedent, dating back to the 17th century civil war between the decadent Ming dynasty and the energetic Manchus. After Peking and Nanking fell to the Manchus, one loyal Ming general, known as Koxinga, took his army across the strait to the redoubt of Taiwan, where his troops dominated the indigenous islanders. Koxinga died in 1662, and though his regime lasted another 20 years, his people gradually lost interest in the Ming cause. Meanwhile, the Manchus gradually won acceptance on the mainland. Though they often met opposition with barbaric cruelty, they also punished incompetence...
Because of Castro's gangster connections, the middle-class democrats of Havana (lawyers, doctors and merchants) consistently underrated him, believing that nobody would flock to such a banner. When their own children did just that, they at least half believed Castro's protestations in his mountain redoubt that he was just another liberal like themselves. Castro cleverly avoided tests of arms with Batista, correctly perceiving, as Thomas puts it, that he was conducting not primarily guerrilla warfare but rather "a political campaign in a tyranny, with the campaigner being defended by armed...