Word: hesse
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...nearly 70 now-a dark, brooding, badger-faced man living in near-total oblivion in the enormous stone pile that is Spandau prison. But in May 1941, when Rudolf Hess suddenly landed in a cow pasture in Scotland and asked to see the Duke of Hamilton, the Deputy Führer of the Third Reich was full of high hope...
...time when German armies, already masters of Europe and most of North Africa, stood poised for a thrust into Russia, Hess brought an offer of peace. Hitler, he said, would guarantee the integrity of the British Empire if England would recognize Germany's dominance in Europe. Drawing for the first time on all the old and new information about Hess's strange, ill-fated mission, Journalist-Historian James Leaser (The Red Fort, The Plague and the Fire) has produced an absorbing footnote to history...
Painstakingly the author follows Hess through every stage of his secret preparation. As an ex-World War I pilot and the No. 3 man in Nazi Germany, Hess easily managed to finagle the use for "practice flights" of an experimental Messerschmidt 110 with extra gas tanks. Aides surreptitiously collected weather charts. Though Leaser's attempt to weld such details into a tale of step-by-step suspense is not entirely successful, his account has some touching vignettes of Hess-playing with his four-year-old son for the last time; standing uncertainly in the door of his wife...
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...
Borges (pronounced Bor-hess) has been neglected because he has long been considered too complex to survive translation...