Word: nevill
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...After two wars I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed," Novelist Nevil Shute once wrote, "and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life." Death did not oblige 60-year-old Nevil Shute last week, for it came prosaically in a Melbourne hospital bed, after a stroke. It was an ending the hero of any of Shute's 21 novels would have understood, for each of them faced up dutifully to the enormity of life...
...Hook for Soloists. Born Nevil Shute Norway in the London suburb of Baling on Jan. 17, 1899, the future novelist was the second son of a postal official who turned vacations on the Continent into competent travel books. Like another famed storyteller, Somerset Maugham, the boy suffered from an agonizing stammer. Sensitive Nevil played hooky, haunting the London Science Museum with its glass-encased models of the pioneering planes of Blériot and the Wright brothers. At the end of World War I, he entered Oxford as an engineering major. Young Norway was an indifferent student but a line...
...World War II, Nevil Shute, with the rank of lieutenant commander in the British Admiralty, worked on secret weapons. In 1950, fed up with confiscatory taxes and a feeling of decline in welfare-state Britain, he moved to Australia. A series of heart attacks grounded the old flyer and curbed his boating and sports-car racing. He settled into the life of a country squire at his pig and dairy farm at Langwarrin, Victoria...