Word: cornishman
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William Golding, English novelist, writes like a French existentialist who has wandered into the Manhattan offices of True magazine. The French practitioners of the art of "the extreme situation" lean to plagues (Albert Camus) or politics and perversion (Jean-Paul Sartre). A Cornishman and sometime naval officer. Author Golding of course sends his existential hero to sea. Aboard a British destroyer in mid-Atlantic, Christopher Martin had just given the order "Hard a-starboard'' ("the right bloody order," too, he later reflects) when a torpedo blew him clear off the bridge. He survives only to be engaged...
...many ways, he seemed hardly the man for the job. He was a frail, redheaded Cornishman, known to most Britons simply as "Q." He wrote swashbuckling romances like Dead Man's Rock and The Astonishing History of Troy Town, so cock-a-hoop with adventure that he himself was "amazed ... at my own immoderation." He had been a dandy at Oxford, with a taste for bowler hats of different colors and loud checked suits ("What, another pair of trarsers!" Trinity's president would cry). He was also something of a radical who had denounced the Boer...
Around Land's End, in sleepy little Camborne by Tintagel, where men say King Arthur was born, a dour Cornishman sat at the foot of a weathered statue. It is a likeness of Richard Trevithick, who harnessed steam so well that he, not Thomas Watt, really launched the industrial revolution. In a turn of phrase the men of Cornwall have used for centuries, the Cornishman broke a bit of news to a neighbor: "Tomorrow, I'm going out to England...