Sublime

Privy Councillor Frau Strodtmann, widow of the great surgeon, sat in the lobby day and night like a sentry, armed with her lorgnette. Her wheelchair (the old woman was paralyzed) was the hotel’s undisputed social news desk and, most important, the final court of appeal as to what was proper and what wasn’t—an aggressive, fanatical intelligence

Reich also noticed that these character structures were held in place by patterns of chronic muscular tension in the body, and he began to look for ways to loosen his patients’ muscular armoring.

Ethik der Ehre

Hanslip’s weakness was a somewhat ostentatious self-presentation. He affected an old-fashioned style, and had had his metabolism tweaked so that he stabilised at about ten per cent overweight: enough to give him a more solid look without requiring frequent adjustments to the heart.

the “death instinct,” which he saw as a “compulsion inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.”

Allen said, “Fermi and Oppenheimer walked down this road countless times. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of the architects of the first generation of nuclear weapons spent the rest of their lives mired in depression.

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, at sixty-eight, was not only the oldest, but the most senior commander in the Wehrmacht.e Known as the “Black Knight” (Schwarzer Ritter), he had led the invasion of Poland in 1939, the breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940, and the capture of Kiev in 1941.

In the centre of the mound lay a man with some of the worst injuries and also the finest weapons, including a ring-hilt sword—the mark of a very high-status leader. Unlike the other bodies, his had not been covered with gaming pieces; instead, he had only one, the king, and it had been placed in his mouth.