Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week Herter with lawyerlike logic spelled out Western objections, wound up by threatening to break off the talks unless Russia modified its stand. Gromyko then made a largely meaningless procedural concession, and agreed to discuss Berlin "simultaneously" with Russian plans for an All-German Commission. So eager is British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to keep the talking going in Geneva so that he would not have to explain a breakoff to the House of Commons (before it adjourns July 30) that Lloyd persuaded his colleagues to forget their threats and return to the bargaining table...
...smoothies in every delegation who brief the gathered press at Geneva were finding it harder and harder to pretend that the allies all felt as one. The French were disgusted. The Americans were inclined to break off. The British used failure of the talks (as once they had hoped to use success of them) to argue for zooming right up to the summit. It looked as if the sad diplomatic phenomenon at Geneva might last at least two weeks more...
...favorite British myth that dies hard is that two Englishmen stranded on a desert island would not speak until properly introduced. Many an American tourist has found the silence in a British railway carriage oppressive. But last week, with an air of discovery, the Manchester Guardian reported the existence in England of something called the Conversing Travelers' Association. The Guardian triumphantly uncovered "what appear to be two facts about the association: it was formed at Letchworth in 1950, and it now has about 1,000 members indulging, as a matter of principle, in 'topical conversation with strangers...
...role. But whereas he portrayed an octet of completely different characters in Kind Hearts and Coronets, his task here is in some ways much more difficult: Guinness, without benefit of contrasting makeup or costume, has to portray two men visually identical and sometimes conversing with each other--a British college French teacher on vacation in France, and a French count. The latter tricks the former into taking his place for three weeks as a "scapegoat." The problem is that, inside, the two men are basically different--the Briton kind and thoughtful, the Count cruel and selfish. Yet, despite protestations...
...Belle downhearted? Not in the least. She had the baby, wrote a book, married a millionaire from Cleveland, later switched to the middle-aged son of a British banker and ran through his fortune in about a dozen years. "Belle." he said gently one day, "we have no more money." Gently, she left him. Before the year was out she was consorting with streetwalkers in London's slums and sleeping at night on the Thames Embankment...