Word: britishism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...started going to Sierra Leone in 1989, nearly all the violence was across the border in Liberia, which was then in the midst of a civil war. Freetown, which sits amid lush rice paddies and rolling green hills, was established in 1787 as a home for freed slaves. The British cut off the slaves' shackles on a block in front of a cottonwood tree that still stands today. But the country is no paradise: the U.N. ranked it the least-developed nation on earth in 1997. The average life expectancy is 34 years...
...attuned to the absurdities of modern life as anyone, the British playwright Tom Stoppard nevertheless cannot believe something he has heard about Shakespeare in Love. "Is it true that in America you can't see this film if you're 15?" he asks, his understanding of an R rating only slightly off. "That glimpse of nipple, and we lose 10 million viewers...
...played all the great queens: Cleopatra, Gertrude in Hamlet, Queen Victoria in the 1997 film Mrs. Brown. She has great swaths of Shakespeare locked in her brain: all of Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream and "probably most of Measure for Measure." So, for British actor Judi Dench, figuring out how to inhabit the role of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love was no great mystery. "I thought she would be a commanding person," says Dench, who is herself a rather gracious person, and all of 5-ft. 1-in. tall. "I thought that...
...hour arrives. The Pentagon insists that 95% of its "mission critical" computers will be fixed by June and all of them before Dec. 31. But nuclear weapons systems in all nations--including Russia, where the state of Y2K preparations is anybody's guess--are computer dependent. In November the British American Security Information Council, a nuclear disarmament group, warned that a Y2K glitch could lead to erroneous early-warning reports or even trigger the accidental launch of a nuclear missile. Nuclear power plants could be vulnerable to the same difficulties. Last year, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission looked...
...early years seemed charmed. As a teenager, she studied briefly with Pablo Casals and dazzled concertgoers. A patron gave her two Stradivarius cellos, the first when she was just 16. With it, she championed such British works as Edward Elgar's melancholy Cello Concerto, which became her signature piece. By the time Du Pre and Barenboim met and fell in love, she was moving in a circle of musical celebrities that included Arthur Rubinstein and Itzhak Perlman...