Word: brilliants
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Chaplin mustache. The son of an Austrian petty customs official, Adolf Hitler was raised as a spoiled child by a doting mother. Consistently failing to pass even the most elementary studies, he grew up a half-educated young man, untrained for any trade or profession, seemingly doomed to failure. Brilliant, charming, cosmopolitan Vienna he learned to loathe for what he called its Semitism; more to his liking was homogeneous Munich, his real home after 1912. To this man of no trade and few interests the Great War was a welcome event which gave him some purpose in life. Corporal Hitler...
...brilliant, hard-working student who finished his undergraduate course in three years, took an M. A. in his fourth. His interests were always violently eclectic, never popular. He fancied French poets but abhorred the self-conscious readings at Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland's rooms, and shied away from the spectacular new drama courses of George Pierce Baker. Harvard scholars then had a Teutonic reverence for degrees, and after a graduate year in Paris Eliot returned to Harvard and worked for a Ph.D. in philosophy, studying Sanskrit and Pali on the side. His Ph.D. thesis on F. H. Bradley...
...until after the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 he was a workaday Washington lawyer. Helping to swing his friend Senator McAdoo's delegates from Garner to Roosevelt at Chicago, and being a Southerner, put him in line for the Roosevelt Cabinet. An assiduous politician but not a brilliant executive, 71-year-old Secretary Roper contributed to the New Deal more than comic relief for cynical journalists, more than platitudinous speeches. He performed the useful function of massaging the bumps on Business' head every time Franklin Roosevelt cracked down on it. The impressive-looking vibrator which...
Lord Londonderry is a potent friend because he is chairman of the Conservative Party. As entertainer in chief to Conservative Governments, he holds brilliant gatherings of lords, ladies, ministers and diplomats which have dazzled many a fiery Laborite. He has been a potent behind-the-scenes figure in Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing the dictators. Last September the Marquess bobbed up at Munich at just the time Friend Chamberlain was arranging for Friend Hitler the big Czecho-Slovak handout. Even after Munich Lord Londonderry advocated a deal on colonies further to appease Nazi Germany...
...much as a woman can, Kay Boyle swaggers too. St. Paul-born, expatriate since 1922, now settled in Megeve, France, Kay Boyle is one of the more uncomfortably brilliant short-story writers and novelists. In October she published her first book of poems, A Glad Day (New Directions, $2). Kay Boyle would have been considered a clever person in any age, except one in which cleverness outlived its welcome. Kay Boyle herself suspects as much...