Word: londoners
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Victor F. W. Cavendish-Bentinck, Britain's ex-Ambassador to Poland (and, just before that, Ambassador-designate to Brazil), was out a job. The far-ranging diplomat broke into the news last spring when his infidelities in Chile, London, and Athens came out at his wife's divorce trial. Last week he was in the news again: he was quietly dropped from the Foreign Service after 25 years...
...group show devoted to the weird shapes modern painters had made of women. His prize exhibit was a painting by the high priest of painful distortion, Pablo Picasso. Picasso's recent "Woman in Green"-a pink snout snoring over a swamp of green swirls-had successfully enraged London last year and was now appearing for the first time in the U.S. Georges Braque's supporting contribution was a painted plaster bas-relief of woman as lo, a harried heifer...
...many children enter school with a natural liking for poetry and are taught to dislike it. Who is to blame? Why, the poetry teachers, answers Strong, who has been a poetry teacher himself.* In his chapter in a new symposium, The Teaching of English in Schools (Macmillan & Co. Ltd., London), Strong distinguishes six common deficiencies in poetry teachers: The teacher dislikes poetry. "A great deal of the current British hostility to poetry dates from the careers of Byron and Shelley, reinforced by that of Oscar Wilde, which have connected it with effeminacy, goings-on, incapacity for sport...
...many connoisseurs consider the dean of crime writers. Neither police nor detectives in the modern sense existed in the 18th Century. Parish constables were amateurs serving a term, and parish watchmen were aged criers, of small use in chasing or collaring villains. Novelist Henry Fielding, while a magistrate, founded London's "Bow Street runners" to pursue criminals- the catch being that the criminal had to be reported before he got out of sight. The professional "thief taker" was not a public official but a shady individual who made a business of collecting rewards...
Footpads, pickpockets and housebreakers, with all the riffraff who lived by their wits, filled the underworld of London's alleys and gin shops with an argot of which traces still survive. "Frisking" meant searching, then as now. A watch was a "tick," a handkerchief was a "wipe," and "wipe priggers" (pickpockets) flourished among theater standees. A glass of gin was a "flash of lightning',, and too many flashes often lit the way to "Tuck 'em Fair" (the place of execution...