Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tuesday night, Wright dined with his wife Betty in a House restaurant, went to the chamber for the President's address, then rushed to his office to start speaking live just four minutes after Reagan finished. He opened with a historical reference: in the English Commons dating back to the 14th century, he noted, "speakers" were those designated to speak to the King, a role that occasionally cost them their heads. It made the point that loyal opposition plays an important but sometimes thankless role in a democratic system...
...does he permit himself any self-pity or sensationalism. The first time he panicked throughout the long ordeal, he writes, was when he had to rush his pregnant sister to a hospital three days after their bewildered arrival in Washington. Assisted in that sudden release and encouraged to learn English by British Poet-Journalist James Fenton, whom he had met in Phnom Penh, the author, now 29, gets it all down with a straightforward vividness that chills the bones. / His portrait of Cambodia lost would in any circumstances be vital anthropology; in the light of what came after, however...
...idea of transportation started in Georgian England, where the poor were relegated to a sinkhole of poverty and misery. Threatened by what it viewed as an emerging criminal class, the English oligarchy embraced the idea of forced exile as a convenient way to get rid of both prisoners and prisons. "Transportation made sublimation literal," writes Hughes. "It conveyed evil to another world...
Captain James Cook claimed that world for England in 1770. He found it inhospitable and sparsely populated by an aboriginal race, whose first recorded words spoken to the English were "Go away!" Newly arrived whites, after 252 days at sea, found a "land of inversions where it was high summer in January ((and)) trees kept their leaves but shed their bark." The island's first lieutenant governor bitterly concluded, "I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worse country...
...convicts to work off their sentences in the employ of private settlers. The program guaranteed the prisoners certain rights, got them back into society, gave them a shot at achievement and became, says Hughes, "by far the most successful form of penal rehabilitation that had ever been tried in English, American or European history...