Word: merchantable
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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...
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...
...major state-owned enterprises, including Jaguar and Rolls-Royce, have been returned to the business sector since Thatcher first took office in 1979. By and large, the companies have prospered. Since it came to power last year, the Chirac government in Paris has sold 25 companies, including the merchant bank Paribas, the telecommunications giant CGE and the large commercial bank Societe Generale. The idea has started to catch on elsewhere. In Portugal, where state businesses have sucked $13 billion in operating losses and subsidies from the economy since the leftist revolution of 1974, the new Social Democratic socialist government...
Nonetheless, some countries remain undeterred. Mediobanca, the leading Italian merchant bank, with assets of $130 million, is still expected to go on the block sometime next year. In Britain, despite the BP setback, Chancellor Lawson last week predicted that privatization would go "from strength to strength." The next item of government business is privatization of Britain's $76 billion worth of electrical utilities...