Word: dullnesses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Throwing a Switch. From his first official act in 1921, when he pressed all 15 buzzers on his desk just to see what would happen (15 department heads streamed into his office), Holcombe's political career has never been dull. He lost four mayoralty campaigns, but was always voted back into office after Houston got a good taste of someone else...
After the excitement of a stretch in the Gordon Highlanders during World War I, life in Scotland's coastal town of Perth seemed a dull prospect to young Bill Hutton. Instead of going home at war's end, he signed up with the Shanghai police. From time to time in the next 20 years, he would turn up on brief leave and let the Perth neighbors goggle at his strapping, soldierly bearing and his fierce military mustache. His father, old Bill Hutton, a railroad worker, seldom failed to point out the framed certificate on the wall awarding young...
During the slow, hard years that followed, F.D.R. began, among other things, a history of the U.S., but abandoned it after 14 dull pages. He began to make history instead. The last letter in Volume II is one he wrote to Mama from Warm Springs during the 1928 presidential campaign for Alfred E. Smith: "I spoke in Atlanta twice last Wednesday and there is an appalling amount of vile propaganda in circulation ... I have had a difficult time turning down the Governorship [of New York], letters and telegrams by the dozen begging me to save the situation by running...
Bette Davis is Montgomery's straight man for the most part, and has to waste a lot of time unraveling the plot (which, although flimsy, is rather intricate). But she is a good straight man, and does a creditable job of sustaining "June Bride" in its dull spots. Although there are a number of these low pressure areas in the film, they aren't very damaging. The Montgomery-Davis combination far out-balances them...
Economist G.D.H. Cole's brief study of Samuel Butler (which is one of a new British list named the English Novelists Series) is, like Butler himself, full of pig-headed notions, but clear, brisk and never dull...