Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...strengths of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that a government-appointed commission can frequently put the government itself in the dock and block its course. Last week a four-man British commission, headed by respected High Court Justice Sir Patrick Devlin, brought in a report on its six-week investigation of the nationalist uprisings last March in Nyasaland, the African territory run by London's Colonial Office. The report flatly called Nyasaland a "police state," and its findings may jeopardize the merger of black Nyasaland with the black and white Rhodesias into a Central African Federation, which is plumping for self...
According to Hoyte. The project is the dream of a studious British engineer named John Hoyte, who at 26 is three years younger than Hannibal was at the time of his invasion. Hoyte became a Hanniphile in 1955 while studying at Cambridge. In 1956 he led a reconnaissance group into the Alps to scout various possible routes, settled on Clapier pass because it fitted most of the meager clues left by the historians. Ancient accounts say Hannibal camped two days at the summit: the summit at Clapier pass is flat enough and big enough to hold a Hannibal-sized army...
...former inhabitants. One was the Emperor Tiberius, who retired some 1,900 years ago to a mountaintop villa from which, records Suetonius, "condemned persons, after long and exquisite tortures, used to be hurled, on his orders and in his presence, into the sea." The other was British Author Norman Douglas, whose bestselling South Wind (1917) painted a thinly disguised picture of Capri as a haunt of elegant wickedness. Douglas himself was asked to leave Capri by the police when he tried to translate some of his fancies into reality; nonetheless, he established the island in the world's mind...
...untidy nest of sticks among the branches. Its occupants: a family of ospreys (fish hawks) with three fledglings-the first to be hatched in Britain since 1916. When the young birds flap off on their own in a week or two, they will mark a signal victory of British bird lovers over their ancient enemies, British egg collectors...
...speckled in a kaleidoscope of purple, orange, red, lilac, buff, chestnut, violet and black. After the turn of the century, osprey eggs were so much in demand that a set of three brought up to $140-and the bird was on its way out in Britain.* In 1916 the British government put ospreys on the protected list (current penalty: up to 28 days in jail, $70 per egg), but it was too late. The last pair in the British Isles had died or emigrated...