Tilting at windmills Cervantes wrote and published "Don Quixote" during the Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), a revolt by the Habsburg Netherlands to end Spanish rule. In "Don Quixote", the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign
The Eel (fictional character) The Eel (fictional character) The Eel is a pulp fiction character, a gentleman thief of "courageous action and questionable morals," created by Hugh B. Cave, writing under the pseudonym Justin Case. Short stories about The Eel originally appeared from 1936 to 1942 in the "Spicy" magazines issued by Culture Publications. In the first of the series, "Eel Trap," the author introduces the character thus: Cave would later explain, in his foreword to "Escapades of the Eel", that it was his admiration of author Damon Runyon that led him to write the adventures using "the same present-tense, first-person narrative style that