Word: british
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Convinced that nobody except Mugabe has anything to lose from a round-table conference, American and British officials are pressing ahead with the plan for calling such a meeting within the next three months. One proposed site: Victoria Falls, with sessions alternating between the Rhodesian and Zambian sides of the magnificent border. Though they may be indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, Western officials suspect that the negotiating process would inevitably tend to separate the pragmatic Nkomo from the zealous Mugabe, and thus pave the way for a broader Rhodesian consensus...
Instead of sweeping beams, the rival British MLS uses a sequence of signals broadcast along arrays of vertical and horizontal antennas. Just as a passenger on a railroad station platform hears a high-pitched whistle as the train approaches and a low-pitched one after it passes by, the approaching aircraft's computer senses an increase in frequency of the radio signals from the horizontal antennas when the aircraft is on one side of the electronic funnel's center line. When it is on the other, a drop in frequency occurs. A similar Doppler shift...
...British, whose Doppler system is built by Plessey Co., Ltd., insist that the U.S. scanning beam is clearly inferior. They also contend that computer simulations done for the FAA at M.I.T.'s Lincoln Laboratory were biased in favor of the American MLS. Some U.S. experts, including a former FAA administrator, John H. Shaffer, agree. But after technical presentations and demonstrations of both devices in Montreal, the ICAO experts voted 39 to 24 in favor of the American system. The U.S. scanning beam has won a crucial round in the quest for a prize that eventually may be worth...
DIED. Frank Raymond Leavis, 82, grand panjandrum of British literary criticism; in Cambridge, England. As a young instructor at Cambridge University, Leavis scandalized his colleagues by daring to lecture on D.H. Lawrence. His reputation grew with the founding in 1932 of Scrutiny, a literary quarterly that measured stringently the moral quality of prose and dismissed both Joyce and Auden for their modernism. An enormously influential figure, he fought his last great battle against C.P. Snow, whom he called "portentously ignorant" for urging the literary world to recognize science...
Across the ocean, Chateaubriand was less successful. Few Americans had heard of him in his own century; today the English-speaking world tends to associate the name with an expensive steak dish (created by a chef during Chateaubriand's brief sojourn as ambassador to England). British Biographer George Painter attempts to resurrect the legend by resuscitating the man. Author of a highly acclaimed and exhaustively researched biography of Proust, Painter has produced the first part of a projected three-volume study. Like its predecessor, it promises to be a model of organization and insight...