Word: nihilistic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Undershaft: To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist . . . all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.-Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara...
...against McCarthy sometimes helped him by exaggerating his importance. To Rovere himself. McCarthy remains "in many ways the most gifted demagogue" in U.S. history, with a terribly sure "access to the dark places of the American mind." But he was no totalitarian, not even a reactionary; he was a nihilist, "a revolutionist without any revolutionary vision." Anything but a conformist, he attacked the Army, the Protestant clergy, the press, the two major parties. He was, says Rovere, ''closer to the hipster than to the Organization...
...character in the book. When the bomb finally goes off, it is not so much an exclamation point as a period to a narrative that has told all but judged nothing. Who is to say that the half-mad sad-sack hero really is different from the nihilist leader, or that the civil servant's allegiance is so far removed from the revolutionary's? Author Biely makes the reader work toward the answers...
...world of saloons Dangerfield is a born chuckee-out. He is very strong. He is able to tear the legs off a chair one by one, and threaten and bully women, one by one. Like Dostoevsky's Shigalov, the inventor of "Shigalovism," he is a nihilist in action. His other activities include getting thrown out of the ladies' room of the U.S. embassy in a wild chase that bears a slight resemblance to poor Bloom's expulsion, "like a shot off a shovel" from Barney Kiernan...
...secret agent on the side). His condition is well understood by an ex-Catholic Pole, a sadist beast named Kowalski, who taunts Brennan with the knowledge that in following a dream of heaven on earth, he has lost honor on earth and all hope of heaven. A true nihilist, Kowalski knows himself as a "lost lackey'' of Stalin...