Word: englishmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Stanbury and his confreres have done is to marry English and American tailoring into a "mid-Atlantic cut." This is somewhat arrogantly described as "not quite what an Englishman would wear," but with more shape than the typical U.S. suit. Nor is shape the only compromise. Lacking central heating, Englishmen prefer fabrics weighing 15 ounces to 20 ounces per running yard; San Franciscans choose almost English weights, but otherwise, says Stanbury, "we can't sell anything over twelve ounces...
...they are also overwhelmingly hospitable. "They kill us with kindness," protested one tailor, who finds himself invited out for dinner and away for weekends. In London, he might be invited in for a drink at most, and that only if he delivered a suit personally. In return, the Englishmen go all out to satisfy their customers. Traveling Partner Frederick Lintott of H. Huntsman & Sons, which specializes in hunting pinks and riding clothes, recalls vividly being awakened at 3 a.m. in his Biltmore suite in Manhattan by a Southern belle who wanted a hacking jacket fitted. Mr. Lintott sleepily obliged...
...John de Crevecoeur, in 1782. Emerson elaborated and sustained the vision, and by 1908, Israel Zangwill, an admiring English Jew, was completely carried away: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all races of Europe are merging and reforming . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians-into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American...
...partisan defender. Scandinavia's much publicized sexual laxity, which in turn produces a high rate of divorce, abortion and venereal disease, cannot be called anything so simple as immorality, he argues: the Scandinavians are merely honest when it comes to sex. "To the Nordic mind, Americans and Englishmen are sexual hypocrites: their pretenses are puritan and Victorian, while their performance is entirely the opposite...
Such nonsense is swept away when a seductive, blonde party intellectual shacks up with him and steals his books. Then she forces the two Englishmen to steal them back from a KGB agent's apartment, after which, naturally, P-G and Manning are kidnaped by the secret police and flung into jail. The book winds up with the two freed from prison and jetting home to London. The implication is that Proctor-Gould is now spying for the Russians. But is he really? Frayn doesn't say. The effect is illogical but somehow appropriate, as it is, perhaps...