Word: failings
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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There is a wind all around the world that whispers to politicians what bills will pass, what bills will fail, long before votes are counted. It sighed in the round pink ear of the Rt. Hon. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill last week, and told him that, despite his burning Tory opposition, the Reform Bill, granting a considerable measure of self government to India, was very close to passage. But all his life the Rt. Hon. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill has been a fighter. Sprawled on the front row Ministers' Bench last week he suddenly arose and addressed the Speaker...
Reading eyes grow blurred, skip words and lines. Heads ache, nerves twitch, stomachs misbehave. Students fail in their classes. Motorists and aviators misjudge distances, sometimes fatally. Many a person so afflicted has gone from one eye doctor to another, without relief. He was suffering from no ailment known to ophthalmology...
Though he thinks Mexico City an unanswerable "argument against our present economic system," mass movements, whether political or esthetic, fail to move his scientific enthusiasm or stir his particularistic curiosity: "It will be interesting to see whether the revivalist enthusiasm worked up by Communists, Nazis and Fascists will last longer than the similar mass emotion aroused by the first Franciscans. . . . Folk-art is often dull or insignificant; never vulgar, and for an obvious reason. Peasants lack, first, the money, and, second, the technical skill to achieve those excesses which are the essence of vulgarity." Author Huxley speaks for the majority...
...about ordinary human beings. When he does he is careful to hide them in a mist of sinister innuendo. His forte is pathology; his most effective stories depend on madness gradually unveiled. In a novel he has space enough for his tortuous unraveling, but many of these short stories fail to convince simply because the reader has not had sufficient time to become bemused. The four best stories stand out from the rest like so many painted thumbnails: Three daredevil neurotics with a condemned airplane, no licenses, tour country towns putting on a crazily dangerous show for a living...
...lectures are interesting from the point of view of their content, but for little else. The lecturer is dull, albeit rather easily followed when it comes to taking notes. The table experiments, however, usually make up for this, except when some assistant has prepared them incorrectly and they fail to respond according to Hoyle. The quizzes themselves, coming always as regularly as Fate, are taken entirely from the two lectures of that week, and count heavily for the term mark. As for the lab work, if the student works earnestly and hard during the entire period, he can finish...