Word: etonisms
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...Versailles peace conference after World War I to the monetary system set up toward the end of World War II, Hession dwells on Keynes' sexual proclivities. Born in 1883, Keynes was the first and favored child of an intellectual Victorian family. He had his first homosexual experience at Eton, and later pursued what was then called "the friendship that dare not speak its name" with Artist Duncan Grant, among others...
...alternative, that seems no condemnation. There has always been a lot of sociological fretting about the bellicosity of sport, how smoothly the exercise of aggression transfers itself to swords and guns-most of which seems nonsense. But even if a line may be drawn from the playing fields of Eton to Waterloo, still the playing fields must be judged preferable; better to be akin to war than in one. What gets observers of the Olympics down may be pure exasperation: Why should the world give up on one international activity that at least has the potential to offer more pleasure...
...classmate, would later remember that Eric "felt bitterly that he was taken on at reduced fees because he might win the school a scholarship; he saw this as a humiliation, but it was really a compliment." The prickly youth did, in fact, earn a scholarship to Eton, winning praise for himself and his school. Yet his account of leaving St. Cyprian's hardly reflects a sense of triumph: "Failure, failure, failure-failure behind me, failure ahead of me-that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away...
...have felt like this at the time; an older man wrote these words in an essay, in a world drastically altered. But Eric's conduct at Eton did not resemble the courtship of success. He idled his way through 4½ years at the apex of English secondary education, growing tall (6 ft. 3 in.) and awkward in the process. He read widely in his favorite authors (Dickens, Thackeray, Kipling, H.G. Wells), contributed some poems to school publications and took part grudgingly in athletics. His father could not afford to send him to Oxford or Cambridge without a scholarship...
...word in American English. This could be the main dilemma facing the redoubtable chronicler of Britain's titled nobility, Debrett's Peerage, which has set out to publish a ten-volume series on the American aristocracy. Debrett's editor, Martin Stansfeld, an untitled Scot who attended Eton and Oxford and whose family "goes back to the Normans," explains that the series will concentrate on "the glittering star system of America's social leadership...