Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Again in disgrace, he was sent back to Cairo and moped around headquarters. His depression was deepened by Atabrine taken to combat malaria. One gloomy afternoon in his hotel room he stabbed himself twice in the throat with a hunting knife. His life was saved by a British colonel next door, who said afterward: "When I hear a feller lock a door, I don't think anything about it, and if I hear a feller fall down, that's his affair, but when I hear a feller lock his door and then fall down-it's time...
...been as carefully prepared as usual: he should have relaxed first with a hot bath so that his neck muscles would not have become tense, and turned the blade. Influence and nerve got him back into action. Within seven months he was sent to India, where a demoralized British army was still reeling from the loss of Burma. Wearing his accustomed sun helmet and a biblical beard, Wingate developed his theory of "long-range penetration groups" to operate behind the Japanese lines...
...officer was U.S. Colonel Philip Cochran, who had won some fame of his own as the model for "Flip Corkin" in Milton Caniff's comic strip, Terry and the Pirates. On their first meeting, Cochran thought Wingate was an elaborate hoax, and was so baffled by his British public-school accent (Charterhouse) that he was sure Wingate suffered from an impediment in his speech. But at their second meeting, Cochran found "something very deep" about him and realized he "was beginning to assimilate some of the flame of this guy Wingate...
...tactical ideas. The U.S. borrowed them for Merrill's Marauders (TIME, April 30) with equally inconclusive results. In this able but densely written biography. Author Christopher (Four Studies in Loyalty) Sykes insists there can be no doubt of their psychological importance. Wingate proved to a disheartened army that British troops could be as adept at jungle fighting as the Japanese. To beleaguered Britain, his exploits brought a badly needed exhilaration, after the long succession of defeats from Hong Kong to Singapore to Burma...
...face of it, this is a hospital novel that makes the most of medical melodrama. But it is as far removed from the usual scalpel-and-suture bestseller as a book on home remedies is from Gray's Anatomy, and it won the choicest collection of British reviews achieved by any book in 1958. Said the Times Literary Supplement: "The book exercises a complete fascination." Said the Irish Times: "Quite possibly a masterpiece." Despite the sometimes awesome gulf that separates British and U.S. tastes, U.S. readers are likely to find themselves agreeing with these judgments of The Rack...