Word: english
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Sacred Cows. In his summing up, Blake suggests that it was this profound disdain for all the sacred cows of English life and government that fed Dizzy's antagonists. Yet, his opportunism and imagination created an impressive political legacy. It was he who first formulated the now-obvious parliamentary principle that "it is the duty of the opposition to oppose." It was Dizzy who wrought the Reform Bill of 1867, giving the vote for the first time to large numbers of the emerging industrial class in Britain. He shaped and dramatized the Tory sense of larger world responsibilities. With...
...long time. At 19, Caroline Glyn, a great-granddaughter of Elinor Glyn, is technically a teenager, but in skill and imagination she is a veteran. Her first novel, Don't Knock the Corners Off, was a winning, blithe schoolgirl adventure that knocked all four corners off an English education-and she was 15 when she wrote it. In her third novel, Oldtimer Glyn looks again into the recent past and examines the chimerical age of 13 in an upsetting setting: a Girl Guide summer camp. For this delightful slip of a book, Glyn gets four gold stars...
...Britain's political pantheon stands one statue raffishly askew, absurd finger-curls atop a drooping, oversized head, a sardonic smile on its decidedly un-English face. Benjamin Disraeli was as unlikely a Prime Minister as England ever had, as prodigal a son as the mother of parliaments ever spawned. During nearly 40 years of Tory leadership, he was hated with rare passion by his enemies, notably Liberal Leader William Gladstone, and often only barely trusted by his own lieutenants. Intrigued more by power than principle, too cynically clever by half in an age craving sober dignity in its statesmen...
...spectacular deeds, he was also a racy and prolific author of social and political fiction (twelve novels), master of the epigram rivaled only by Oscar Wilde and, says Blake with the refreshing lack of equivocation that distinguishes his book, "the best letter writer among all English statesmen...
Blake peels the petals off this flowery picture with loving precision. Disraeli was born in 1804, in no sense underprivileged. His father Isaac was a well-known, successful anthologist with a pleasant country house and an entree into at least the second rank of English society. Dizzy could have gone to the Establishment schools if he had wanted to-both his younger brothers attended Winchester-but he skipped school to get on with the great game of life, for already ambition was burning a hole in his dandy's pockets...