Word: heroic
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...oppression. Out of this blood-soaked, soul-scarred land, a writer has emerged whose works constitute a massive indictment of tyranny. Ivo Andric, 70, won the 1961 Nobel Prize chiefly for his novel The Bridge on the Drina, in which he chronicles three centuries of heroic Bosnian endurance of oppression. Devil's Yard and the three short novels contained in The Vizier's Elephant are less epic works but no less powerful...
Collectively, the group is alternately scathing and ridiculous. The former emerges most strongly in a thing called "Aftermyth of War" which effectively debunks the smug nonsense about Britain's war effort, but which also has recurring undertones of near horror and revulsion. (Dame Myra Hess is lampooned for her heroic series of concerts at the British Museum--surely not an inherently funny undertaking; and the skit ends with a singing of Auld Lang Syne which suddenly runs down like a broken record player, suggesting--what? That the whole war effort was a fraud? That the years of the war were...
...into the Virginia aristocracy that produced four of the U.S.'s first five Presidents, Monroe had an affinity for history in the making, and he lived his life in the thick of it. As a teen-age officer in the Revolutionary Army, he was severely wounded in a heroic charge at the Battle of Trenton. He became a captain at 19, a lieutenant colonel at 21, drew from Washington a commendation as a "brave, active and sensible officer." It was characteristic of Monroe, with his gift for being in the right place at the historic moment, that...
...thing, the hero's heroism looks less heroic every minute. No doubt he was moved by a generous impulse when he offered to rescue the President; but he was also moved by a merely conventional sympathy for the underdog, by a sentimental horror of violence, by a hysterical temptation to escape from his miserable self. What's more, an admirable act has not made him admirable; he is still silly and incompetent, and when he isn't barking at her mechanically he still wriggles with lap-dogged devotion for the bitch he is tied...
Carried into Battle. In the 14th and 15th centuries, tapestry was the supreme art of France. Rich in color, heroic in theme, and expensive to make, tapestries were the trappings of luxury. Yet they had a practical value. They dressed up the bare stone walls of a castle, and they kept out the cold. Many a shivering demoiselle was grateful for chambres, movable partitions of tapestry which could subdivide a drafty great hall into a cozy nook...