Word: englishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Edgar Hoover liked his FBI agents to have degrees in law, accounting or both, but it now turns out that the bureau could have used some Ph.D.s in English. Both The New Yorker and The Nation magazines last week documented nearly half a century of FBI surveillance of more than 100 prominent American writers, including six Nobel laureates (Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill and John Steinbeck). The gumshoe lit crit was sometimes comically inept. FBI files, for example, described the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay as possibly subversive because she used the "analogy...
What would English literature -- or for that matter, English sexuality -- have done without gamy gamekeepers, lurking unrepressed in the gorse, ready to help the privileged class assert its true randy nature? What the ineffable Mellors did for Lady Chatterley, Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves) does for Maurice Hall (James Wilby) in this adaptation of E.M. Forster's fantasy about physically fulfilling the love that once upon a time dared not speak its name...
...this was too technical for our English major-to-be. He opted for another method. He went through steps one through three, see above...
...VERY first words addressed to me by my summer employer were unremarkably observant. "My God," he cried, "you're English." This, alas, is all too true. It is also something of a novelty in the British Houses of Parliament, where the lobbies echo with the sound of eager young Americans panting for the fray. Far from being the club-like sanctum it popularly is supposed to be, the British Parliament rapidly is becoming a summer camp for hordes of keen foreigners...
...APPEARS that the English are unwilling to work for no pay. They subscribe to the wholly rational theory that future employers--if there are such a thing in these uncertain economic times--will look with righteous scorn upon such futile experience. Someone they feel who is either foolish or rich enough to work for nothing while still a penniless youth undoubtedly will still be both foolish and rich enough to do so later. Ergo, a distinct lack of natives chomping at the bit to join the lowly hordes of parliamentary researchers...