Word: matters
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...British Empire which is daily exalted in the stentorophonic Beaverbrook press is not the semi-religious conception of Disraeli, nor the gaudy military pageant of Kipling. It is a practical matter, in which plans for extracting power alcohol from nipa palms and wrapping paper from bamboo are seriously discussed as matters of statecraft. But it is also an Empire that is very close to today's realities-an Empire usually on the defensive, hiding its weak spots, conserving its treasures and its energy...
...actually had two wives and ten children, as a lovesick young bachelor, and explained England's participation in his canal-building as the result of a General Election which never occurred. In Sixty Glorious Years, a dinner-table chat between Disraeli and Queen Victoria shows how the matter was actually handled. This reverence for the real is characteristic of a picture which is aimed at historical fidelity rather than romantic excitement, but often achieves both...
...Capitol at twilight, a 27-year-old Englishman named Edward Gibbon once dreamed of writing a massive work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. At that time the British Empire was growing strong. And to young Edward Gibbon the fall of Rome seemed a simple, faraway matter: wealth unmanned the noble Romans; Christianity enfeebled the masses; the barbarians advanced...
Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men-besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard...
...first place, if after November Hours the budding mathematician attempts to change his section, he will find that this is quite impossible because no two instructors cover the field in the same order. And not only do the section men assert their independence in the matter of order, but they also differ in their exams and teaching technique. On the one hand there are men who make every effort to teach, to clarify the subject to even the slowest student; on the other hand there are those who merely lecture, treating any question as an inexcusable interruption. Of course...