Word: causticity
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...showpiece items in Britain's leading humor magazine, Punch's cartoons are known the world over. But its punchless articles are scarcely noticed even in Britain. It was not always so: once Punch was as well known for its caustic writing and cartoons on the social and political scene as it was for its humor. Punch shocked the world by printing Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt," a poem that bitterly described the sweatshops of the Industrial Revolution, and during World War I, Punch's attacks on the Kaiser were so pointed that the Germans...
Personality: Lean and wiry (5 ft. 8 in., 145 Ibs.), caustic and witty, brusque Yankee. Married in 1923 to Rachel White, who regularly packed his lunches while he was governor, once repaid him for morning grouchiness by filling his sandwiches with laundry soap. On another occasion, Adams objected to Rachel's driving the family car to morning-coffee sessions with neighboring housewives, padlocked the garage door. His wife entered the garage through a side door, rocked the car back & forth until she pushed the front doors off their hinges. The Adamses have three daughters, a son and three grandchildren...
When Nichols took over Mathieson, the company was barely keeping pace with the fast-growing chemical industry. It had only three plants, turning out caustic soda for making rayon, soda ash for glassmaking, and liquid chlorine. By a series of mergers and purchases, Nichols expanded to 20 plants and moved into other fields. He bought a fertilizer company and two of the biggest sulphuric acid plants in. the world, pioneered in the field of petrochemicals by extracting them from natural gas far from the well and close to the customer...
What would McGranery do about corruption in Government? "Clean it out and get rid of it . . . Weed out and fire any incompetent, disloyal or dishonest employee . . . Easy as pie." With McCarran's help, he brushed off, as mere feuding, some caustic testimony leveled at him by his Philadelphia enemy and fellow Democrat District Attorney Richardson Dilworth. (Said Dilworth of McGranery: "He would be most political . . . Anything would go for his political friends, anything to garrote his political enemies...
Captain Shotover, portrayed by Philip Bourneuf, is easily the most competent acting job of the performance. Made up to resemble Shaw to an almost uncanny degree, he played the caustic, detached sceptic to perfection. The senile captain is the author's caricature of himself as a bitterly disappointed old man. In sharp contrast is Mazzini Dunn, an ineffective 19th century liberal, whose mealy-mouthed idealism is fit only for the parlor. Earl Montgomery played this part with skill and with a consistency notably lacking in many of the roles. Basil Langton's direction of this difficult play...