120

replied, "I don't want to touch it with my fingers - I just like to have a sniff and see what it smells like."

p321

It was not, indeed, a question of fear. It was something quite different: a paralyzing sense of one's own helplessness to which we were all prey, not only those who were killed, but the killers themselves as well. Crushed by the system each one of us had in some way or other helped to build, we were not even capable of passive resistance. Our submissiveness only spurred on those who actively served the system. How can we escape the vicious circle?

p369

During the search of our apartment in 1934 the police agents failed to find poems I had sewn into cushions or stuck inside saucepans and shoes.

p271

Hope against Hope by Nagezhola Mandelstam

Atheneum - paperback - 1970

121

*punk = strumpet "Love in a Wood" Wycherley end Act I

Barbara pulled at the latch-string of his affections, Wycherly lowed her in, and over his slightly abraded doorsill swept the Duchess, beautiful and profane. there was no intimacy promised. It was commanded.

p74-75

Brawny Wycherley by Willard Connely 1930

2.9.81

Humour, that soft nurse through his life, that dominant passion which always reached for Wycherly with a long arm if he strayed, had come at the last to tug at his pillow, even whilst death stalked back and forth atop the coverlets. p.334

Pope had not been kind. How could he long be kind to anyone? His deep and spongy brain shrank up his heart to the size of a sparrow's eye. p.324

"There is nothing like a hanging to concentrate the mind." - Dr. Johnson