Word: class
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...human family, is as definitely pigeonholed in the animal world by taxonomists (biological classifiers) as is Sylvilagus floridanus, the cottontail rabbit. The gun-shooting, crystal-gazing, ballot-casting species-called Homo sapiens by taxonomic courtesy-belongs to the genus homo, the family of Hominidae, the order of primates, the class of mammals, the subphylum of vertebrates, the phylum of Chordata, and to the animal kingdom...
Where Lou Ruppel specialized in "sock," Managing Editor Borden specializes in poise, acquired at Dartmouth (Class of 1926), Harvard (M.A.), University of Chicago, where he taught Shakespeare until he joined the Times in 1929. He was a flying fanatic until one day in 1932, when he tried to do an Immelmann turn from the ground, cracked up with two broken ankles and his face halfway through the dashboard. During his long hospital convalescence, he kept the broken instrument board at the foot of his bed, as a memento mori...
...prefer," says Sassoon, at 52, "to remember my own gladness and good luck, and to forget, whenever I can, those moods and minor events which made me low-spirited and unresponsive." His happy memories are really a tribute to the optimistic spirit of upper-class Englishmen's pre-War world. That spirit Siegfried Sassoon conveys exactly. Defending it, The Old Century is his testament that the worst that can happen in peace is idyllic compared to the best that can happen...
John Fane, a sleepy, upper-middle-class London publisher, father of four grown children; and Mary Fane, who putters around their country home planning parish fêtes and dinners for twelve. At 53 John finds he has money, leisure, no fun. Soon he has a town apartment, a mistress, no wife...
Galsworthian technique-thorough rubber-necking at upper-middle-class lives -is at best photographic, kaleidoscopic; at worst trite, futile, obvious. One of Alec Waugh's characters testifies against the author on page 263 (not yet the end): "Her marriage had become like a novel on whose two hundredth page the reader, foreseeing the climax, can only remain inquisitive as to the actual means by which the ultimate unravelling is to be achieved...