Word: huxley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since the beginnings of science, every age has had its tradition of explainers, often scientists themselves, who clarified new and difficult ideas. In the 19th century, T.H. Huxley served as the spokesman of Darwinian evolution. Later such skilled popularizers as Arthur Eddington and Bertrand Russell helped interpret the startling new worlds of relativity and quantum mechanics...
...premium on bloodless analysis and objectivity. While these principles might apply in an odd way to Montaigne and Francis Bacon, it must be remembered that the congenial essay has always been one of our most personal, eccentric, and adaptable forms. "One damn thing after another," Aldous Huxley called it, "but in a sequence that in some miraculous way develops a central theme and relates it to the rest of human experience." In fact, in the annals of world literature, the unrestrained essayist (essai: attempt, trial, experiment) has always kept courageous and often dangerous company: Plato, Cicero, Carlyle, Swift, Twain...
Such literary journeying reached epidemic proportions during the '20s and '30s. It would be easier to list English authors who did not write travel books during the period than to name all those who did. These included D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh, among scores of others. The English had always been energetic travelers; the Empire had seen to that. But Fussell thinks that the modern exodus that began in 1918 was different and that the chief difference was World...
...logic failed to destroy that idea, observation would do nicely, since the sight of mingling, embracing athletes at the close of the Games is characteristic of nothing in the world or in the Games themselves but momentary (and partly ceremonial) good nature. Observers of the sporting life, like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, had a dimmer view of the Games. Orwell called them "war minus the shooting." The connection with war has always been up front. Coubertin, who argued for French colonialism as ardently as he did for reviving the Olympics, admired the relationship between British colonialism and sports...
...place was ankle deep in dust," said Willwerth. "It was surrealistic, a study in black and white, like a page out of an Aldous Huxley novel." Photographer Bill Thompson observed the effects of the volcanic cloud as it reached eastern Washington. Said he: "It was the bees that scared me, weighed down with ash. They staggered around like plaster casts of them selves, leaving wavering tracks on the dirty white blanket...