Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...colored mansion sits like a ghost in the midst of Taipei's swirling traffic. The heavy wooden doors, surmounted by iron spikes, are sealed shut. Shards of broken glass protrude from the high, surrounding wall. The pole inside the compound that flew the U.S. flag for 63 years (first when the island was under Japanese domination, later under the Republic of China), with only wartime interruptions, does so no longer. Now a set of rough, unpainted boards nailed across the brass plaque on the gate obscures its legend: EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA...
...students are housed in dorms. In addition, labs are ill-equipped, textbooks long outdated, libraries usually closed. Says Student Union President Christos Papoutsis about Law 815: "It's like trying to construct a building from the second floor up, having forgotten to put in the foundations and the first floor...
...since the first hammer dropped to the highest bidder have sales of valuables commanded such audiences, such publicity, such prices. While anything that is relatively rare is sure to fetch a pretty penny at auction these days, things of beauty and lasting worth-"objects of virtue" to the trade-are going for sums that would boggle the I of Claudius. Ars gratia auctionis. Throughout the U.S. and the rest of the West, once listless salesrooms thrum with auctiophiliacs in search of a piece of the past; the top firms hold several simultaneous sales a day six days a week...
Many other factors have combined to pump up the proceeds. First-rate works of art are in short supply, and becoming ever more scarce, as the auction catalogues-if not the sales figures-sadly reflect. The prizes go mostly these days to citizens of nations that do not extract excessive taxes from the wealthy: Switzerland, France, West Germany, Japan and the Arab countries. Americans remain very much in the market, however, thanks in part to U.S. tax laws that permit a collector to deduct contributions from his taxable estate if he has willed his treasures to a museum. The museums...
...important auction combines the tension of an operatic first night with the ambience of a celebrity party. A top auctioneer has the talents of a croupier, a fight promoter and a matinee idol. As SPB President John Marion, who has wielded the gavel for 18 years, said to TIME'S Georgia Harbison: "A good auctioneer is very much like a good lecturer. Everyone should understand what's going on and be sitting forward in his seat." He added: "Sometimes the atmosphere in the salesroom is absolutely crackling. The eyes of the whole world...