Word: londoners
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...misses of the second half of the twentieth century have been recorded. That that score is most often a losing one should surprise no one. In this, the final volume of her Children of Violence quintet, Mrs. Lessing takes her heroine Martha Quest from the ruins that passed as London after World War II and deposits her on the brink of the twenty-first century amid its assorted, but not at all surprising, cataclysms. As Martha passes through each successive decade (the late fourties and an attempted return to normalcy; the espionage and red-baiting of the fifties; the calculated...
...novel opens, Martha, in her thirties and a white refugee from colonial Africa, is wandering through a dislocated London where cellars are damp and paint is blistering and wood is rotting. In evoking a gray, totalitarian world, and in showing how, no matter what minor fluctuations the government undergoes, the poor never escape that world, this novel reflects Orwell's paternal influence. Politics, particularly the opposition politics of the Labour Party and those groups to its left, become the novel's initial concern. Yet, for Mrs. Lessing, politics are now something of a dead end. She sardonically delights in unearthing...
...fading of empire came a new kind of presence, dominated by the Commonwealth Office and Britain's elite, 154-year-old diplomatic corps. The corps' own style, always rigid and decorous, has relaxed somewhat in recent years, allowing ambassadors to shed their uniforms and correspond with London in cables rather than in formal script. But its expense has not. Last year diplomacy cost Britain nearly a quarter of a billion dollars-a style that the purse-pinched government in London can no longer afford...
Cautious Conservatism. After he joined the European circuit in 1964, he and Clark shared an apartment in London. Their digs soon became known in racing circles as the "Scottish Embassy." Stewart married a Lowland lassie, Helen McGregor, who came to understand the substance of her mother-in-law's fears. At the Belgian Grand Prix in 1966, her husband's car spun out of control as he whipped around a rain-slick corner at 150 m.p.h., and ripped through a telegraph pole and a tree before it screamed to a halt. For 35 minutes Stewart was trapped...
Alas, the marvels of science so relished by Wells have produced far less than Utopia. Lovat Dickson, formerly an editor and director of Macmillan and Co., Wells' London publisher, cannot quite forgive the man who blithely sold the masses on the future. But he makes clear that Wells was the first gulled victim of his own salesmanship, and that with his extraordinary capacity for hope went an extraordinary capacity for disenchantment. Inside the complacent optimist, a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly...