Word: discern
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...relaxation, he joined the Verein Turmwächter (Harvard's German Club), became its treasurer. With fellow club members, he spoke German, drank beer, sang German songs, heard German speakers, discussed German culture. For all their Germanic carousing, his companions remained good democrats. But they soon began to discern in Dale Maple a growing admiration for Adolf Hitler, and for Nazi "efficiency." Dale took perverse pleasure in shocking his associates by singing the Horst Wessel song and Deutschland Uber Alles. When pink-cheeked Faculty Adviser James Hawkes became perturbed and tried to squelch his Nazi talk, Dale conceived...
...aside from the purely geographical facts that Novelists Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood emigrated to Hollywood, Poets Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice to New York (TIME, Oct. 30). But this spring, a couple of portents appeared, one of them described as such by a writer well qualified to discern it. In a foreword to The Blaze of Noon, Novelist Elizabeth Bowen declared : "This novel, by knocking away devices, by moving beyond the known terms of reference, looks like-and I think is-the beginning of something new. Unlike most English novels, it is unprovincial: coming now, it may come...
...talents in contemporary letters. The reader who takes in the show exposes himself to so furious a narcotic cyclone of Poe, Melville, Mark Twain and original Faulkner that the best he can do is to hang on to his hat and wits. As the storm screams past he may discern a number of things, mainly favorable to the author and to his own pleasure...
...cling with fondness to whatever is ancient, and who, even when convinced by overpowering reasons that innovation would be beneficial, consent to it with many misgivings and forebodings. We find also every where another class of men, sanguine in hope, bold in speculation, always pressing forward, quick to discern the imperfections of whatever exists, disposed to think lightly of the risks and inconveniences which attend improvements, and disposed to give every change credit for being an improvement. In the sentiments of both classes there is something to approve. But of both the best specimens will be found not far from...
Their methods are spectacular and press-conscious. The strategy is to get prominent men to speak on subjects which they conceive to be related to their cause, but it is impossible o discern any cause behind their eccentric gyrations. The Student Union supports a plan to bring Jewish student refugees to Harvard, and some of the Independents crack back with a plan, however commendable, to bring South American students here, as if to show that the Union has no monopoly on humanitarianism and the interests of democracy. The implication is that their policy derives from a reaction against that...