Word: litmus
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...lecture tours, tell him in awe: "You are the first Jewish person we have ever met." In sharing the Germany of this new generation, some of Germany's Jews regard themselves as a reminder to Christians of the sins of the past, and as a continuing litmus paper for testing the country's democratic intentions. "There has not yet been any test of Germany's democracy," says Heinz Galinski, 49, the leader of West Berlin's Jewish community. "Such a test comes only during difficult times. But we have hope in the generation now coming into...
...poetry." The author's wish is clear: to be judged for his poetry, not for the 70 or so books of excellent autobiography, historical fiction, criticism, classical scholarship and translations from several languages that he has written in the past 40 years. Using A. E. Housman's litmus for a true poem ("Does it make the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving?"), many readers will be moved to heed the author's plea and consider him first of all a poet...
...approval by a solid 2,532 plurality over his Democratic rival, C. (for Charles) Edwin Gilmour, 41. The election fascinated politicos for two reasons: 1) the Fourth District, with a large population of corn-hog farmers and smaller but important groups of factory workers and merchants, is a good litmus for testing the trends of the Farm Belt; 2) only a year ago the district sent the first Democrat in its history to Congress. (The Democrat, Representative Steven Carter, died in office, thus last week's by-election...
...Juliana delivered another royal oration, and the London Sunday Dispatch gleefully revealed what it claimed to be the slimming secret: a bland diet ordered by a fat, fiftyish hair-restorer salesman named Jos de Cock, who runs the "Enorga Institute" in The Hague. After an analysis of strips of litmus paper that a prospective weight loser licks after meals, went the story, De Cock devises a special diet for a low-calorie fee (sample: $37 for eight weeks' advice, plus $17 for the diet lists). Despite palace "No comments," Hollanders thought that De Cock might soon be paring...
...Kinsey litmus would probably show that the average Frenchman is no naughtier than most people, but French novelists have made his little delinquencies into one of the most readable of literary exports. To be sure, there are the existentialist writers who manage to turn sex into a measure of personal calamity and there are the Mauriacs who turn it into a measure of sin. But for the moment, U.S. read ers can settle back in relief with two new French novels that restore the classic Gallic atmosphere to the oldest game in the world. In both The Green Mare...