Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...chancellery in Peking. On the dot of the ultimatum's expiration, even though all but 18 of the 19 prisoners had been routinely released, hundreds of Red Guards pushed past acquiescent Red Army and police guards. They crowded into the British diplomatic compound, shouting Mao-think slogans in English and French and throwing Molotov cocktails. Inside were 23 British diplomats, women and children. The mob set the chancellery afire, forcing the British to come out; nine of them, including Hopson, were beaten and kicked before being turned loose...
...fuses sight and sound into a single artistic unity. His people speak in a curious linguistic melange, basically Bengali but liberally daubed with English stock phrases. His musical background, which he himself composed, is a similar fluid mixture in which a line of Oriental melody moves imperceptibly toward a Western cadence...
Slums & Monuments. In Ireland, the English tend to become more Irish than the Irish. The taxi driver who took Pritchett to his first hotel was full of "bedads" and "begobs," but turned out to be a cockney. Ironically, the great buildings of this attractive city were erected by the Anglo-Irish in their 18th century heyday; fortunately, they escaped disfiguration during the 19th century industrial revolution that blighted England's cities but bypassed Ireland, in part because of its disastrous famines, in part because of its own preoccupation with its more romantic national affairs. The Bank of Ireland (once...
Williams' story does contain some rib-a'd fun. "Come on, desiccated creeps," Reaney cries out in a with-it drinking club, "throw off your guilt, throw out your chests, you're English. Form up the squares, Kabul to Kandahar, Mad Mullahs, Pathans, Uhlans, Marshal Ney -stuff the lot of them, bloody foreigners, show them cold English steel." But his writing is marred by cliches of thought ("That was life, people dominated by people, dominating others in turn") and some awful puns ("Ezra Pounds while Ernest Humsaway...
...antihero-it is simply a case of the protagonist as pudding (in this case, Yorkshire). Peter Reaney is as square as Trafalgar. He dangles from familiar hang-ups: a nagging wife whom he calls Her Malevolence, a job about which he feels guilty, and a loathing for the contemporary English way of life. His conversation is modishly cynical: "Take to the boats, lads, and let the women drown...