Word: basil
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...Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry is a pugnacious and uncompromising airman with a fine World War II battle record and a reputation for talking out of school...
Last week at 53, Britain's most famous flying brasshat was placed on the retired list. No "appropriate appointment" available, " said the R.A.F. "I am being . . . sacked," Sir Basil corrected. "I have strong views." The most recent Embry views: the R.A.F. is unready for atomic war, dominated by the civil service, shackled to outdated strategy and outmoded jet types by pound-pinchers at Her Majesty's Treasury. Like his good friend General Curtis LeMay, chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Command and another battle-tested brasshat, Embry thinks that the next war will turn on the air forces...
...Basil, who wears a D.F.C., A.F.C. and four D.S.O.s, is popular with flyers as a leader who would fly anything they could. Promoted to a big command early in World War II, he led his Blenheim bombers on one more mission, was shot down over France. He slipped away from the Germans three times, once killing three captors with a knife and the butt of a sentry's rifle, another time impersonating an Irish Republican Army man (and spouting Urdu when asked to show that he could speak Gaelic). He slept one night in an absent German general...
Firebird was no novelty to the U.S. The Col. de Basil company toured it in the '40s, and George Balanchine's New York City Ballet has done a shortened version -carefully avoiding such delicacies as the soul-in-the-egg. The Sadler's Wells version was faithful to the original choreography of 1910. In fact, it captured the old spirit so well that the once-daring Stravinsky music began to sound just like Mussorgsky with wrong notes...
Spectacular (Sat. 9 p.m., NBC). Svengali and the Blonde, a 90-minute musical version of George du Maurier's Trilby, starring Carol Channing, Basil Rathbone. Narrator: Ethel Barrymore...