Word: britons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Auden's position is beginning to be as influential as that of his friend in England who also traded countries, St. Louis-born T. S. Eliot. Both wrote militantly anti-religious poems at one period of their development, but are now Anglo-Catholics. Auden is a shock-headed Briton with chewed fingernails and schoolboy charm, whose love of language is so active that he is never quite sure he doesn't write entirely for fun. He feels and says that good U.S. writers are too inhibited to admit "the basic frivolity...
Basically, however, the average Briton's woes stem from his government's self-contradicting attempts to expand production and exports while, at the same time, saving dollars by not buying food or permitting some individual freedom of buying. Because Britain is overly sensitive of her debtor status she offers her workers intellectual incentives--promises that four or five sacrificing years will bring the long sought fruits. But the vital daily incentives, the extra meat, or new suit of clothes, are withheld...
Last week Harry St. John B. Philby, Briton-turned-Moslem, familiar intriguer in the Arab world and intimate of Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud, arrived in India "to buy tents." He went into a huddle with Moslem Leaguers and Hyderabad officials. Delhi was sure Jinnah was angling for the support of Moslem states in the Middle East...
...deep-sea divers working on the sunken British submarine Thetis were a scientific problem to famed Biologist J.B.S. Haldane. One day, early in World War II, Briton Haldane impetuously clapped on an oxygen mask and, breathing pure oxygen (to study its effects), "dived" in a pressure chamber to a depth of seven atmospheric pressures (200 feet). The experiment nearly killed the experimenter, but it proved to him that oxygen, under pressure, is a violent poison...
...members of the Labor Cabinet (Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton, Food Minister John Strachey) wear the black-&-blue old school tie, and are proud of it. So do six Labor and 57 other M.P.s, such left-wing literati as Cyril Connolly and George Orwell. But many a Briton was finding it hard last week to visualize Eton in a socialist future...