Word: flea
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Equipped only with small arms-and moral authority-U.N. Secretary-General Hammarskjold and his flea-sized army appeared Lilliputian figures alongside the forces they were to keep apart (the Anglo-French invasion force alone was 50,000 strong). In Egypt the puny army must somehow ensure that two of the greatest nations in Europe abandon with grievous loss of face a last-ditch attempt to dominate a region of the world vital to their survival as major powers...
...Bottom, Button Up Your Overcoat, Birth of the Blues), and Sheree North is usually around to sing them. The show glides along, smooth as a Detroit Air Cooled ("buoyant readability")-a dependable vehicle for those who long to be carried back to the days when the girls did the flea hop in short skirts, and the demand for violin cases was curiously in excess of the demand for violins...
...scene is a suburban English pub, and two middle-aged ladies named Margaret and Jill are having a quiet chat. Suddenly, a bitter accusation flashes above the gin. Margaret, hiking her skirt, declares that Jill has brought a flea into her life. It seems that the flea-not an "ordinary" London one but "some great black foreign brute"-sprang from Jill onto Margaret. But why was Jill harboring the flea in the first place? Because a young sailor had given it to her-not intentionally, of course, but because he and Jill went to bed together...
...This flea circus, a hilarious yarn, sets the tone for this whole collection of 25 short stories by V. S. (for Victor Sawdon) Pritchett. At 55, Pritchett is perhaps the best literary critic now writing in English. He is also a subtle interpreter of national character and environment (The Spanish Temper) and an occasional but brilliant dabbler in fiction. He calls his short stories "the only kind of writing that has given me pleasure [and] always elated me." The elation is shared by the reader...
...discovery, after years of basic research into the structure of matter, that a solid metal such as germanium or silicon (earth's most abundant solid element) can be made to act like a vacuum tube, i.e., it will amplify an electric signal. Result: the flea-size transistor−and a king-size new industry. Thirty-five manufacturers have already turned out 7,000,000 transistors v. 1 billion vacuum tubes now in use in the U.S., are doubling output each year. Transistors will multiply the speed of future telephone exchanges 1,000 times; they have infinitely refined and compressed...