Word: tales
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...explain the bottomless public fascination with the story of the Titanic, I wouldn't pin it on the idea that the sunken ship represented a moral tale of hubris or of careless luxury but rather on the fact that it was both a magnificent and flawed piece of work, and that it became most interesting when it was lying out of reach underwater. How to get down to it and bring it to the surface? How to grasp something so wonderful, confident and ruined, a creation as immense as the past...
...hear Slobodan Milosevic tell it, his surrender to NATO was the happy ending to a fairy tale. Appearing before his bombed-out, beleaguered nation on TV last Thursday, he said, "The aggression ended. Peace prevailed. Dear citizens, happy peace to us all!" It's hard to know how any rational Serb could stand it. After starting and losing four wars in eight years, Milosevic was calling on his people to rejoice. Some bought it, singing along to the government tune. But once the Serbs wake up from their agitprop reverie, they will discover a country in ruins. Some were already...
...wrenching yearning when gazing upon a diamond tiara, a trinket she initially attempts to wear around her neck. Discovering the item's true function, she burbles, "I always love finding new places to wear diamonds!" Movies can offer a very specific bliss, the gorgeousness of a perfectly lighted fairy tale. Watching Marilyn operate her lips and eyebrows while breathlessly seducing an elderly millionaire is like experiencing the invention of ice cream...
This "fairy tale" disintegrated into a cafe-society postscript. Living in exile in France, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they were officially styled, benefited from air fares and hotel suites paid for by nouveau riche hosts. They decorated the best nightclubs, the Duke always looking a bit bewildered. (There is a photo of them at El Morocco wearing matching paper crowns.) When the Duke died in 1972, he left Wallis 3 million [pounds] and a small tribe of pugs. She lived into a sad senility...
...while he was kind, he did not love her. Still, he was grateful to have Anne's words and to find they had power to influence the world. The book, and working on it, I think it saved him. Eva Schloss wrote Eva's Story: A Survivor's Tale by the Step-Sister of Anne Frank