Word: hedgehog
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Ambrose Usher first bubbled into print, London critics hooted happily that the model for the talkative detective was obviously brilliant, pudgy Sir Isaiah Berlin, Oxford don, author (The Hedgehog and the Fox), cross-country conversationalist and, during World War II, a first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. Jocelyn Davey was a nom de plume, and there seemed good reason to suspect that Sir Isaiah might be Author Davey, as well as Hero Usher. To save a fellow Reform Club member from disrepute, the real author stepped forward: brilliant, pudgy Chaim ("Rab") Raphael, who was at Oxford with...
...knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -Fable of Archilochus...
...among the foxes of the world, Chiang Kai-shek long ago found the hedgehog's one big thing: the world's primary and implacable enemy was and is the Communist conspiracy directed from Moscow. It was a single-mindedness that in the 1930s exasperated his countrymen (who wanted him to fight Japanese instead of Communists), in the 1940s, General Joseph Stilwell (who wanted him to arm Communist troops to fight in Burma) and President Harry Truman (who insisted that he coalesce with what Secretary of State Byrnes termed "the so-called Communists"). While many bright young foxes were...
...serious scientific work with kernels of fact in most of the fantastic legends. The remarkable thing, says White, is not that most of the observations were wildly distorted, but that they were made at all, across continents and centuries. Science aside, who would want to miss the 12th century hedgehog model that "provides itself with double breathing holes, so that, when it suspects the north wind is going to blow, it can shut up the northern one"? Or the camel which, when sold to a stranger, falls ill in disgust over the price? Animals may not be what the bestiary...
...which described this erratic but Pacific aviator as "an odd but charming creature which serves no useful purpose at all," was somewhat disturbing. Although I do not consider myself a bird fancier, the statement sets off a few serious overtones. What is the useful purpose of a starling, a hedgehog, or indeed, TIME'S Science writer...