Word: hopelessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...young column writer whose search for meaning amid his readers' hopeless letters wears his life away, Fritz Weaver cannot hope to out-decibel bellow-mumble-grunt O'Brien; and his adapted lines haven't the edge to slice through to the audience; but this may not be all O'Brien's fault, for Weaver drowns in turbulent philosophical soliloquies which West raced over...
Face to Face. About 18 months ago, Ronald Knox, working on a translation of the Autobiography of Ste. Therese of Lisieux, began to feel poorly. In January he had surgery for cancer of the intestine, and the doctors found the disease so far advanced that his condition was hopeless. But before he had known how ill he was, Knox had accepted an invitation to deliver the prestigious Romanes Lecture at Oxford in June. He was still determined...
...skinny, sad-eyed Stan Laurel, onetime understudy to Charlie Chaplin. Two of America's few genuinely creative comedians, interested more, as Hardy once said, in "human appeal" than in "straight clownish antics," they teamed up in 1927, and as bumblingly chivalrous misfits strove ineffectually to solve hopeless problems (e.g., while struggling to get a grand piano over a narrow suspension bridge across a horrifying chasm between two Alpine peaks, they would encounter, midway, a gorilla). Hardy was the master of mime and the bowler-bouncing doubletake, and, faced with Laurel's witless works, the withering glare...
...with the Wehrmacht at the English Channel, and beleaguered Britain waiting seemingly helpless and hopeless on the other side, Germany's Minister to Portugal sent an encouraging telegram to his boss in Berlin, Foreign Minister and ex-champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Duke of Windsor, Britain's ex-King Edward VIII, it said, was ready and eager to return home with his American wife to reclaim the throne of Britain for both of them. To bring this about, the message went on, there were two possibilities: either England would urge him to come back, which Windsor considered...
...Sherman Act and subsequent antitrust legislation. Since 1950, the roly-poly Economics Minister has been struggling to persuade West Germany's Bundestag to pass its own anti-cartel law. At times, Erhard's fight-which Germans jestingly called "the Seven Years' War"-seemed hopeless. No European nation had ever adopted a law comparable to the Sherman Act, and none appeared less likely to do so than Germany, fatherland of the classic cartel. (In the mid-1930s, experts estimated that nearly 2,000 cartel agreements were in force in German industry.) Already chafing under the decartelization imposed...