Word: men
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...group in Gutenberg's inky way) do much to disprove his own thesis. Paradoxically, too, so will his book itself, at least temporarily, if it achieves the wide attention it deserves. "Chatter about Shelley" may be contemptible, but Shelley's chatter was often more important than most men's theses. Even lately George Orwell's essays and memoirs have achieved an influence likely to persist beyond 1984. Letters and men of letters are declining, but they are not yet entirely fallen. A shooting star or two may still be seen with the naked...
...Pigsbrook" was the way Victorian Critic F. J. Furnivall referred to Algernon Charles Swinburne. The poet wrote of Furnivall as "Brothelsdyke." Vituperation, however, has gone out of style in literary controversy, and it is the thesis of British Critic John Gross that this is a pity. If men don't lose their tempers over literature (as once they did over theology), it means that literature doesn't matter much any more...
Gross has had the excellent idea of passing in review a long file of "men of letters" from Francis Jeffrey and Thomas Carlyle to T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis who agreed on nothing but shared a belief that their literary squabbles were deadly serious engagements in a battle for the keys to the kingdom of the mind. Scientists, today's high priests, may regard their theories as the most important thing on earth; after all, there is the conquered moon to prove it. But once Carlyle could say, and be believed, that the man of letters...
Literary Thunderheads. For Gross's purposes, "men of letters" are critics and journalists-as distinguished from novelists, poets, playwrights and other creative persons, though countless creators served as men of letters too. His well-read line of English literary men should really be traced back to Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets began the great industry of literary criticism and gossip. But what began with a bang (Johnson was capable of no lesser noise) is clearly ending in a whisper. Between Johnson and Eliot lay the great age of the literary thunderheads, roughly dated between...
...border remains touchy. Soviet armed strength in Asia is estimated at up to 1,500,000 men. Countering this force along the border are more than 40 Chinese divisions, totalling about 300,000 men. Over the past several months, the Chinese have become increasingly worried by reports in Western newspapers hinting that Moscow is considering a preventive strike against Peking's atomic-weapons plant at Lanchow and the nuclear testing grounds at Lop Nor, although Kosygin has dismissed such stories as "total nonsense." According to an Indian Foreign Ministry report, China now has begun moving its Lop Nor facilities...