Word: brogan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...better gags in "Movie Crazy" are visual, and the most inspired scenes need no sound at all. One such shows Lloyd, wearing one shoe and a-straw hat, pursuing his other brogan through a rainstorm as it is carried along in a gutter millstream to the inevitable sewer inlet. Later on, the hero inadvertently dons a magician's dress coat, complete with eggs, mice, sausage, rabbits, and the traditional squirting carnation, and has himself a time on a crowded dance floor...
Socialist Britain had been fully warned that Wallace would be speaking for himself alone. Wrote Denis W. Brogan, an acute observer of U.S. affairs: "Britain will be welcoming not the leader of a great mass movement, much less the leader of a great national party, but a distinguished plant geneticist, a former vice president, and the editor of ... a weekly review...
Most of Author Brogan's essays feature historical figures, but, in the modern manner, the chosen figure serves equally as a peg on which Author Brogan hangs dissertations on social conditions and any lively bits of stuff that catch his eye. The essay on Marshal Bazaine, for example, is not merely a portrait of the man who lost the Franco-Prussian War, it is also a discussion of the grand tradition of French marshals, from Turenne to Rochambeau...
...study of General De Gaulle (written when the Free French had their headquarters in London) has much to say about the traditional reluctance of the French to accept a leader whose feet are not actually on French soil. And in addition to his wealth of purely French material, Author Brogan draws constantly and easily on analogies and contrasts from British and U.S. history and characteristics (he is probably one of the few English scholars who can quote, virtually in the same breath, from addresses by Montaigne and Boss Pendergast...
...faults of French Personalities and, Problems spring from the same sources as its virtues. Author Brogan's erudition often climbs over the reader's head, his sensitiveness in matters French leads him into pretentious overuse of French words and phrases. Most, readers will be justly irritated, for example, at being obliged to swallow sentences as obscurely pregnant as the following: "In a sense, the noblesse de ĺépée was almost innocent compared with the noblesse de la robe. For the court nobility was at least true to form; the intriguers of oeil-de-boeuf were...