Word: backdrop
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Under the gauze of London's blue-grey November mist, the Portland stone buildings of Whitehall, the delicate tracery of trees in Parliament Square, the twin towers of Westminster Abbey all melted together to form a silver backdrop. Fresh sand strewn along the procession route made a golden carpet...
...bygones and conducted the overture to Die Meistersinger and the Fantasia from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. As the music died away, the blue curtains parted. After a slight (inevitable) delay, the large balding head of Quintus Fabius Maximus' disciple Harold Laski popped through the white backdrop. Laski, peering over the big red carnation in his buttonhole, advanced to the rostrum followed by Prime Minister Attlee, Lord President of the Council Herbert Morrison, Food Minister John Strachey and Education Minister Ellen Wilkinson, all wearing red carnations...
Against this backdrop, the status of the Russian Baptists looked fine to the visitor from Atlanta. Baptist missionaries had struggled hard since the 18th Century to break the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church, finally succeeded in getting a real foothold only 40 years ago. Their biggest boost came during the revolution, when the Reds used them to undermine Orthodoxy...
Tremor of Finality. "Operation Crossroads" (the irony of the name is intentional) had been ordered by the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, would be carried out under the command of Vice Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, Commander of the joint Army-Navy task force. Against the peaceful backdrop of palm frond and pandanus, on this most "backward" of islands, the most progressive of centuries would write in one blinding stroke of disintegration the inner meaning of technological civilization: all matter is speed and flame. Well might the stone giants embedded in the solid earth of Easter Island feel...
Littler than Least. Vienna in the late spring of 1946 was a broken city. The baroque grandeur of its stone merely served as a backdrop for uncleared rubble, and the remnants of its once-blithe spirit were merely counterpoints to present hopelessness. Within the brief flash of 30 years, Vienna had in turn been the gay and gilded center of an empire, the outsized capital of a bankrupt rump republic, a subordinate, provincial town in Nazi Germany, and the cringing wartime scene of bombings, street fighting, burning, looting...