Word: nye
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...name. Roaring into the House of Commons in 1929, the original Angry Young Man, he became-second only to his archfoe, Winston Churchill -the most hypnotic orator and contumacious politician of 20th century Britain. One of seven surviving sons of a Monmouthshire miner who died of lung disease, "Nye" Bevan, even in his plummy days as a Buckinghamshire squire and playboy of the West End world, never forgot or forgave the hardscrabble existence eked out by the working folk of his native valleys. His principal monument is Britain's National Health Service, still the model of womb-to-tomb...
...Nye recklessly ignored Oscar Wilde's advice: "A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies." In the darkest days of the Hitler war, Bevan accused Churchill of "petrified adolescence." (The patrician Prime Minister, in the course of their 26-year feud, called Bevan a "squalid nuisance" and later "Minister of Disease.") In one of the worst gaffes of his career, Bevan denounced Conservatives-presumably, all 8,093,858 Britons who had voted the Tory ticket in 1945-as "lower than vermin." Nor were his own leaders spared Nye's spiced tongue. He thought...
...this second, concluding volume of Bevan, Author Foot acknowledges that Nye was by conventional reckoning a failed man. The main reason he never made it from a dirt-floored cottage to No. 10 Downing Street was not his reckless invective but a stubborn insistence on such highly unpopular policies as Britain's retention of its own nuclear deterrent. "We should not," said Nye in one of his most famed declarations, "go naked into the conference chamber." Though he and Jennie Lee, his tough Scottish wife and fellow M.P., seldom lacked caviar or claret, Bevan railed eloquently against...
Michael Foot, a close associate of Sevan's and since Nye's death in 1960 the M.P. from his old constituency of Ebbw Vale, has completed what is obviously a labor of love, with personal insights and inside information rarely available to a political biographer. He depicts, to be sure, a Nye in shining armor. He also makes clear that with Bevan's demise the fire went out of the belly of British socialism...
...Ronald Frazier is amusing enough as Elbow, the malapropistic constable (a type better managed in the Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing); and so is the clowning tapster Pompey of Rex Everhart, who has been doing such roles for the AST off and on since its first season. Gene Nye turns the disreputable Froth into a stuttering nincompoop that is vastly overdone; measure. Mr. Nye, please...