Word: avidity
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...Robinson's father permitted him to attend Harvard as a "special student." During his two years in Cambridge his letters bubble with reports of avid study, vast reading and literary enthusiasm. Yet he continued to suffer from the curse of his shyness; he self-consciously reports a search for "someone . . . with whom I can smoke a pipe and talk of Matthew Arnold." Robinson was aware of his social limitations; while visiting a professor's house, a girl took him under her wing, but "I do not think she was trying to seduce me . . . her eyes were too large...
...grew less frequent as the festivities narrowed toward the ceremony itself. The crowd began to gather early the night before in favored places near Buckingham Palace and Parliament Square. The crowd was good-natured, a bit rowdy, ill-clad and ill-fed. And, more than in other times, avid for the show that would lift it, not by illusion but by legitimate right, into a symbolic reminder of its own worth. As they waited, chaff flew. When black smoke poured from the palace chimney, a wit said: "Blimey, now they've gone an' burnt the blinkin' soup...
...Tawny Pipit (Rank; Prestige) is -to the English-an exceptionally rare species of titlark. When a pair of them nest in an English field, for the second time on record, World War II becomes about as important, at least to England's more avid ornithologists, as a movie organist's spot between features. England's lay bird lovers are almost as deeply stirred; the whole village of Lipsbury Lea is determined that the pipits shall hatch their brood in peace...
...year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, inheritor of $20 million, avid pursuer of the outdoor life (horses, deep-sea fishing, hunting, aviation). An instructor pilot in World War I, Whitney entered World War II as a major, served ably in Africa, the Pacific and Washington, came out a colonel with the Distinguished Service Medal...
Crusaders. "Japan," rhapsodized Baldwin, "is an uplifting experience. It is a crusade." General MacArthur feels that he has an almost mystical duty to "purge the soul of the Japanese people. The Japanese are learning to stand up on their hind legs to authority." As avid to ape Western political and social forms as they once were to imitate Western industrial techniques, the Japanese are trying everything from open forum debating to the Virginia reel...