Word: casual
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...possible, the messes of every British ship prepared long pink rows of Singapore Gin Slings for U. S. officers.* The city of Singapore and the British Government voted 2,000 Straits dollars ($1,200) for the entertainment of the U. S. crews. Wrote the Singapore Free Press: "The most casual observer can see that the decision to send three American cruisers to Singapore was actuated by more than a desire to repeat those goodwill visits which have featured Singapore's naval life in recent years...
William Lynn as the diminuitive hero is charmingly casual throughout his confessions and the gradual confirmation of them. His role is so exaggerated that it could be filled only by an actor of the right appearance as well as of the requisite skill, and fortunately Mr. Lynn has both. Cecilia Loftus is a splendid old rake of a mother-in-law, who surveys the career of her son-in-law with no illusions, and advises her daughter his wife to be faithful or the opposite with a realistic view to the husband's fortunes. Blanche Sweet is quite satisfactory...
Though each year 700 new convicts arrive at Devil's Island, at year's end death and desertion account for about 700 missing. Thus the convict population remains constant at about 3,500. Dry Guillotine illustrates these grim statistics in the making, grinds on with an almost casual description of diseases, guillotinings, tortures, feuds, corruption. In the end a kind of tranquillity creeps into Belbenoit's account...
...high altitudes oxygen deficiency is dangerous not only for physiological but for psychological reasons. Chronic effects of oxygen-want appear only in pilots, are never seen in casual passengers. "The point at which oxygen-want should be relieved in the pilot," declared Captain Armstrong, "is the subject of heated controversy. The average pilot thinks it is smart to go to a high altitude without oxygen. Oxygen-want is like alcohol. The worse off one is, the better he feels. It is regrettable that oxygen-want is not an extremely painful process...
...book begins with Joseph nervously putting last touches on the Wotton Vanborough exhibit. With this scene as its casual centre it launches into a circling recital of upper-crust extravagances and lower-class problems, mixed, its methodical madness suggesting nothing so much as a cross between Evelyn Waugh and Marcel Proust. Proust and Waugh have at bottom much the same chillingly precise appreciation of high-flown decadence, and the combination of their two techniques here serves the author very well. Waugh-ish are the incidental plot and background, which largely describe the scurryings from London to Paris to the Lido...