Word: wrought
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Perhaps nothing better illustrates the changes wrought by the occupation than two wartime jokes that Author Walter Maass-a Vienna-born chemist who worked with the Dutch resistance-retells in his book. In 1940, when the occupation began, the Dutch stores were so well stocked that German officers spent much of their time shopping for delicacies unavailable at home; a British agent in a German uniform was caught, the story goes, because he wasn't carrying any packages. In 1945, the humor was more of the gallows variety: facing a German firing squad, two Dutch boys smile when they...
...after a stroke effectively removed him from power, he seems to have grown horrified by much of what he had wrought. From his sick room he railed against the strangulating Soviet bureaucracy and denounced the "Russian chauvinism" that he saw crushing the rights of national minorities. In his testament, which has never been published in Russia, he wrote that Stalin "concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not certain he can always use this power with sufficient caution." In a final postscript to his will, he vainly pleaded that Stalin be removed as general secretary of the party...
While raising many practical and legal questions, the postal strike also underscores the helplessness of government in the face of organized, even if nonviolent, lawlessness. It also points up the growing tendency on the part of individuals and special interests to press their demands despite the havoc wrought on the community, and demonstrates the deterioration of discipline that has become a major challenge to U.S. society in recent years. In spite of state and local laws forbidding such actions, strikes by public employees have spread like an epidemic throughout the nation. The Government's effectiveness?or lack of it?...
...take an individual who has an idea, and who tries to go to the end of his idea." His films have always been pieces of criticism, visual essays about ideas and culture in a declining West. He was never interested in making "good art." That notion of finely wrought and finished work was itself the legacy of a moribund sensibility...
...admit that he is a seer. The author of The Adventures of Angle March, Henderson the Rain King and Herzog observes his age with no excessive charity. Chaos? Yes. Senselessness? Yes. Disintegration and despair? Be the author's guest. The dour view itself is not remarkable. Well-wrought chaos and subtly evoked senselessness have never been in such abundant literary supply. A reader thinks, with varying respect, of Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut, Cheever, Barth...