Word: bigwig
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...last week, when Mr. Sargent sent out his 22nd hot bulletin, his audience had become impressive. Egging him on were H. L. Mencken, Boake Carter, John Dewey, Charles Beard, Stuart Chase, Robert Maynard Hutchins, many another bigwig. Johns Hopkins' President Isaiah Bowman wrote: "If you cut the bulletins off, I shall cut you off in my will...
...last week. "I thought at first that my friends had been implicated . . . when I heard the false reports that Hess [Deputy Nazi Party -With Nazi Protector Baron Xeurath Leader Rudolf Hess] had been killed," said Herr Strasser on arrival in P'aris. The fact that no Nazi bigwig was killed in the explosion convinced him, he said, that the Nazis themselves had set the bomb to increase the Fiihrer's popularity, and he cracked with a grin: "The beer hall, four weeks before, had been insured by a Swiss company...
Then came a brand new question: Identify the contemporary ruler or political bigwig who is i) a shoemaker's son, 2) a baker's son, 3) a blacksmith's son, 4) a bastard's son. They got the first three in short order: Stalin, Daladier, Mussolini. For No. 4, Oscar Levant's candidate was Adolf Schickelgruber. A woman in the audience disagreed.* "Wasn't he, really?" queried Fadiman, glancing owlishly around. "Well," spake John Kieran, beating Fadiman to the evening's punch line, "he is, if he wasn...
...exception to the Simon & Schuster rule, Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock's Men of Music, was deliberately modeled on a previous success,Thomas Craven's Men of Art. To write it, the publishers hired no established bigwig of professional music criticism, but a couple of relative unknowns, one a member of their own editorial staff. Result: Men of Music avoids the pious saws and muddy technical jargon of conventional musical biography, describes racily and well the flights and foibles of those posey, neurotic, childlike, hardheaded geniuses who wrote the world's great symphonies and operas...
...train with what dignity they could. Frail, bespectacled Granville Hicks, a free-lance critic, writer (I Like America, John Reed-The Making of a Revolutionary), whose appointment to a Harvard fellowship raised a great stir in 1938, resigned not because he disapproved of the Russo-German Pact, but because bigwig Reds approved it before they could possibly know anything about it. ''The leaders of the Communist Party," wrote Mr. Hicks in the weekly New Republic, "have tried to appear omniscient, and they have succeeded in being ridiculous. They have clutched at straws, juggled sophistries, shut their eyes...