Word: barbarianism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Blue," says the Barbarian Britannus in Shaw's Caesar & Cleopatra, "is the color worn by all Britons of good standing. In war we stain our bodies blue; so that though our enemies may strip us of our clothes and our lives, they cannot strip us of our respectability." Though Britons long since ceased painting themselves for battle, they were blue all over last week about their position on the Far Eastern Front of the War of Nerves. The Japanese, having stripped Far Eastern Britons of clothes and Face (Oriental for respectability), moved troops into position along the border...
Lear was a professional expatriate of the Robert Browning-Walter Savage Landor school. Most of his life was spent in Rome, Corfu, San Remo. His travels through Europe, Asia and Africa look like a map of the Barbarian Invasions. He saw Petra before Doughty, was nearly killed there by the Arabs, muddled through with superb British calm. Fanatics tried to assassinate the author of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat in India, in Turkey. At last Lear settled down in his San Remo villa with an Albanian servant and his cat Foss, "his daily companion for nearly 17 years." There...
Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men-besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard...
...hoping to make it a base for their southerly drive to Hankow, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's provisional capital, the flood was a severe setback. Tokyo papers at once accused the devilish Chinese of having sprung the dikes as a strategic military move. "An atrocity," cried Damei, "by barbarian Chinese. . . . The Japanese are making frantic efforts to check the flow and to rescue the Chinese caught in the flood area, at the same time repulsing Chinese attacks...
...greatest thinker of his day, and it is no fault of his that today his very name is synonymous with all that is black and treacherous. He was not a wicked man, unless patriotism is a sin. He was not a barbarian, but rather an historian, an ambassador and a dramatist. Indeed there were few cultural past-times in which he was not adept...