Word: cretes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Beatles and Monty Python, and made me laugh when I listened to the shows on CD last year for a column on Sellers. Puns, outlandish narrative detours and other foolery are wildly evident in Milligan?s scripts. In the ?Ill Met by Goonlight? episode, the Goons land on Crete. Sellers: ?Ooh, this beach is hard.? Secombe: ?Then we must be on con-Crete!? They...
Thirty years ago, my girlfriend and I took an overnight ferry from Piraeus, the port of Athens, to Iraklion, on the island of Crete. After mooching around the Minoan ruins at Knossos, we hitchhiked to the wildly beautiful lands in the west of the island. The girlfriend became my wife, and every year or two since-15 times in all-we've returned, to the same village, the same indescribable light, the same White Mountains plunging into the same wine-dark...
...been thinking about the village since the Bush Administration's decision to accelerate handing over sovereignty to a new Iraqi government. For here's the thing about western Crete: it has become modern, but it hasn't become American. I don't simply mean that the obvious appurtenances of American life-fast food, SUVs, baseball, whatever-are absent, though they are. More important, American ideas, American heroes, American dreams are missing too. For many Cretans, for example, there is something incomprehensible about the U.S. President. "George Bush," one old friend said to me last summer, "is always photographed next...
...Americans. Not everyone wants Big Macs, 200 TV channels and the separation of church and state. Nations are capable of finding their own paths to modernity. That will be as true in Iraq as it has been in a village in the shadow of the White Mountains of western Crete. Americans need to get used...
Keegan also studies Stonewall Jackson's brilliant use of local knowledge to lead the Union armies a frustrated chase up and down the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. There are chapters on the British disaster on Crete in 1941 ("Foreknowledge No Help"), on the Americans' immense triumph at Midway a year later (a world-historical victory that owed as much to luck, Keegan ingeniously argues, as to intelligence) and the struggle of British intelligence to locate and destroy Hitler's U-boat offensive against England...