Word: tyrants
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...tragic phantasmagoria," uses allegory, fantasy and surrealism to evoke the terror of a totalitarian system. His central character is Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a provincial town. Varlam combines Stalin's close-cropped haircut, Hitler's mustache and Mussolini's black shirt to embody the image of a universal tyrant. Although the setting and time are undefined -- secret police appear alternately as medieval knights or spear-wielding Roman centurions -- there is no doubt that the real subject is Stalinism...
Margarite Morris is one of this breed. Tall and skinny, of indeterminate antiquity, she is known as Weekly, or the Newspaper of Claremont Street, because she cleans the houses and spreads the gossip in a prosperous old neighborhood of an unnamed Australian city. Weekly is a de facto tyrant. When a stray cat periodically invades her sparse room to give birth, Weekly knows that she can give away the kittens as presents to the children of her employers ("Oh Weekly you shouldn't have. Really you shouldn't"). Any household unwise enough to turn down such a gift risks full...
...that there was much opportunity for lolling around. Like many who make their fortune before they shave, he was an obsessive worker and something of an office tyrant. Former staffers recall that he insisted on being called "sir" or "Mr. Minkow," yet would habitually forget their names or call them by unflattering sobriquets. Challenged, he would reply, "My way or the highway." He once reportedly boasted that he would fire his own mother if she stepped out of line...
...Stalin's mind and to understand the process of cunning and paranoia that led him to terrorize an entire nation. In lengthy internal soliloquies that some ^ readers of the manuscript have found deeply disturbing, Stalin coldly ruminates on what Rybakov calls the "technology of power." At one point the tyrant says, "A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then be passed on to the people...
...they lash out at their own kind -- a colleague in Ma Rainey, a son in Fences. These confrontations can seem like old-fashioned melodrama in comparison with the plotless minimalism now in vogue. But Wilson has the weight of history on his side. If Troy Maxson turns tyrant, betraying his wife with a younger woman and blasting his son's chances for an athletic scholarship to college, his demand for autocratic power is understandable, almost forgivable, in the context of his decades down South during the era of Jim Crow...