Word: alec
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...like a dream, that the next name in the lists after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Edward Heath is Margaret Thatcher." With those uncharacteristically emotional words, the coolly competent M.P. for Finchley accepted her triumph as the first woman ever to head a political party in Britain. Winning seven votes more than the mandatory majority of 139, Mrs. Thatcher, who had toppled former Prime Minister Edward Heath from his ten-year reign as Conservative Party chief the week before, soundly defeated a formidable array of four male challengers. Her leading opponent, Party Chairman William Whitelaw, drew only...
...stop our crazy progression from clue to clue, is an icy cynicism. The detective's ultimate values are never really cynical--if they were he'd be the criminal and not the detective, whether he's Margaret Rutherford playing Agatha Christie's insufferable Miss Marples or Alec Guinness playing Chesterton's quaint Father Brown or Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade explaining, after Miles Archer's murder, that you have a duty to your partner...
...Alec Guinness is rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and doing it cautiously, for his February 1976 television performance with Genevieve Bujold in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The show's sponsor, Hallmark Cards, is still aching from the karate chop rendered unto Winston Churchill by Richard Burton on the eve of his starring role in The Gathering Storm. Shaw wrote that Caesar "bought men with words," but Sir Alec, talking about the play, sounded like a translation from Latin: "Anything that is reasonably civilized is likely to have an underlying wit." Somewhat...
...laughter from a stone. Benny might have enjoyed a film career as durable as Bob Hope's. As the Polish ham in Ernst Lubitsch's wartime comedy, To Be or Not to Be, the comedian gave one of the screen's classic performances. Indeed, British Actor Alec McCowen, whose humorous timing derives from Benny's, called the old pro "one of the greatest comedic actors in the world...
...ideal candidate for a scholarship to Yale (class of 1958), and that's what he got. In New Haven the poor, bright, pint-sized Midwesterner felt left out, though his classmates were dazzled by his ability to make instant anagrams out of any name that was mentioned ("Alec Guinness" became "genuine class"). Along with French and German, he acquired a great many cultural tag lines and thriftily squirreled them away in the back of his mind for future use. Cavett is certainly the only comedian extant who could say, "Where did we get this obsession that exegesis saves...