Word: merchant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...leopard-spot trousers, courting the social and cultural glitterati, restlessly glamour-traveling the world, he made it clear from the start that the critic's customary place as a dim lurker in the shadows was not for him. A bourgeoise childhood (he was the bastard son of a merchant who achieved knighthood) in provincial Birmingham taught him his lifelong horror of grayness. His legendary Oxford career as controversialist, actor, debater, director, dandy and libertine imbued him with his tropism toward fame's warming light. Indeed, it might be argued that his life's central mistake was the innocent notion that...
...Empire of the Sun, the boy is James Graham, eleven-year-old son of an English merchant in Shanghai at the first shell burst of World War II in the Pacific. Behind the camera is Jim's spiritual cousin, Steven Spielberg, 39. Spielberg's trials of the past couple of years have been nowhere so cataclysmic as those that befell Jim, his family and millions of other refugees under the imperial Japanese boot. Still, they must have injected an unwelcome dose of maturity into the man with a lock on childhood. The films produced recently under his aegis have fizzled...
...warp. Young Jim (Christian Bale) loses his way because, in the tumbledown panic of escape from Shanghai, he reaches for his precious toy airplane instead of holding onto his mother's hand for dear life. Once on his own, he leaps into the grasping arms of a scurvy American merchant seaman (John Malkovich). Jim might be an Oliver Twist auditioning for Fagin, or a Pinocchio begging to visit Stromboli's summer camp...
When London Merchant Peter Durand patented the tin can in 1810, the world was changed forever. Canning revolutionized life on the farm, in the kitchen, on the battlefield. In the 20th century, life would seem primitive and deprived without cans. In 1986 some 102 billion canned items were manufactured. One category of container, the aluminum easy-open beverage can (69 billion produced last year), has so proliferated that the mere existence of empties has engendered a brand-new folk industry. Can picking, some call...
This is not a tale of rags to riches. The Goldschmidts, like their neighbors and relatives the Rothschilds, had been prosperous merchant bankers in Frankfurt since the 16th century. When Jimmy's grandfather Adolph came to London in 1895, he came as a millionaire and bought a mansion off Park Lane. Jimmy's father Frank, who changed his name to Goldsmith, went to Oxford, fought at Gallipoli, sat in Parliament, but found London's wartime anti-German emotions so painful that he moved to France, married a French wife and prospered in the hotel business. He lived in a world...