Word: basilic
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Despite the Four Feathers mood that clings to it, Sir Basil Liddell Hart's last work is magisterial. On active duty in World War I, he rose only to the rank of captain in the British army before being gassed in 1916; yet, as his country's foremost military historian, he became a matchless armchair general and indeed, as pioneer advocate of fast-moving armored columns, a teacher of generals. Liddell Hart worked on this history for a quarter-century; he died last year while correcting proofs. Quite literally, it is his epitaph, and an appropriate...
...Hitler in Central Europe. Allied military planners, on Liddell Hart's evidence, were little better than the politicians. He credits them with inviting Hitler's invasion of Scandinavia with loudly proclaimed plans to mine Norwegian ports and cut off the flow of iron ore from Sweden. Sir Basil thinks somewhat more highly of the German generals. But even they, he admits, succeeded in their dramatic 1940 breakthrough on the Western front partly by accident. Their initial plan for the invasion of France was a right-flank wheel through Belgium along the lines of the 1914 Schlieffen plan, which...
...their past, a totally moral one, and the Western was as popular during good times as during bad. The swashbuckler, which was regarded as epic only when stricken with elephantiasis, was always a totally escapist form: it transported the audience to a never-never land where evil baron Basil Rathbone could say to rebel Errol Flynn, "You speak treason!"; to which Flynn could add: "Fluently." What creative rapport could Hollywood establish with twelfth-century England or Italian buccaneers? All they could do was film the material as excitingly as they could, and spice it up with Campish or currently idiomatic...
...Rudimentary, once you get the hang of it," he replied. Examining the dregs of his tea, he continued, "I see myself in the next century played by a number of actors on jiggling celluloid. Raymond Massey, Basil Rathbone-hello! what's this?-Here I am in 1970, in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes...
Among other losers in state campaigns were Basil Paterson, Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Adam Walinsky, Democratic candidate for Attorney General, and Allard K. Lowenstein, seeeking a second term in Congress...