Word: 20th
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...1980s. Earlier this year Lloyd's found itself dragged into court by a group of its investors--the so-called Names, who pledge all their personal wealth to underwrite insurance policies issued by Lloyd's syndicates--claiming they were the victims of one of the great swindles of the 20th century. As TIME recounted in a special report last February, the Names said they were fraudulently misled about huge potential liabilities resulting from compensation paid to American workers afflicted by asbestosis and lung cancer. They further alleged that the Lloyd's hierarchy was party to the fraud because it knew...
During the 1960s, astronomers' lust for light was temporarily satisfied by the development of electronic light detectors. Because these detectors are up to 100 times as sensitive as photographic plates--the standard recording medium since the turn of the 20th century--every telescope on Earth saw its power boosted a hundredfold essentially overnight. That kept the scientists happy only for a while, however, and everyone agreed that telescopes needed some sort of radical new design. Unfortunately, says Matt Mountain, director of the Gemini Observatory, "nobody knew how to make the conceptual leap...
Like most collections, this one amounts to a fan's notes, not an encyclopedic survey. It contains almost nothing from the 19th century, and the 20th century inventory is light on landscape and street photography, heavy on fashion and portraiture. But it's a highly credible assortment, brainy and fun, with samples from most of the major episodes of 20th century photography. There's a fair selection of greatest hits--Edward Steichen's 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson behind a scrim of black lace, Dorothea Lange's inevitable Migrant Mother of 1936--and some less familiar examples by big names...
...first volume of Schlesinger's memoirs, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (Houghton Mifflin; 557 pages; $28.95), is a rich, spirited performance. Schlesinger moves energetically down the years, meeting everyone worth meeting, dispensing opinions (sometimes brilliant, sometimes merely partisan and captious, sometimes dead wrong, as when, early on, he pronounces Harry Truman to be a corrupt mediocrity). T.S. Eliot wrote, "The trilling wire in the blood sings beneath inveterate scars,/Appeasing long forgotten wars...
...Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s autobiography, "A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950," is being published this month by Houghton Mifflin...