Word: sphinx
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Greene's home is in Oxford with his wife, Vivien, and two children, but he often disappears, bobs up again in the backstreets of other countries, where he scours the sleazier dives and nightclubs for not-so-fresh material ("Paris is not the same since they closed The Sphinx,"* he says). Recently returned from a tour of Vienna lowlife, he is at work on a new thriller and a movie script (The Third Man) for Producers David O. Selznick and Sir Alexander Korda. His slumming adventures are received by his family with mixed feelings. His white-haired old mother...
Whatever the impact of those forces, they produce a student body which is subtle as Sphinx, many-sided and totally lacking in unity of approach or opinion on almost any subject. This breakdown of the undergraduates into group after self-sufficient group is probably the most significant psychological factor in the College today. Schizophrenia, it might be called, and it is unique and potent: not even the most basic conception of "school spirit" serves in Cambridge as it does at New Haven or Princeton to tie atomized particles of the student body together. Here one proud band isolates itself behind...
...Sphinx of Springfield," cried Dr. Tansill, wagging a lean finger in the general direction of a bust of Lincoln (which stared sadly south), played "fast and loose" with Southerners "in order to trick them into a bombardment of that famous Fort [Sumter]." He had blocked all Southern conciliation attempts, had succeeded in starting the War Between the States and then laying the blame on the South. But, sputtered Dr. Tansill, the South should not even now think of its "struggle for freedom" as a "lost cause." "The glorious Confederate flag . . . Belleau Wood . . . Patton's crusaders . . , never be furled...
...medicine for popular consumption - Grief, Despair, Pear's Soap or Macy's Men's Suits Made to Measure. [It is] meant to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx...
Alexandra Dumas (The Three Musketeers), who published some 1,200 books over his own name (he ran the first ghostwriting factory), seemed to be not quite all published yet. Turned up in Paris: the manuscript of an unpublished novel (The Red Sphinx) about Cardinal Richelieu...