Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Odd Base. During the debate over the interest rate, Bill Fulbright took off onto a new and unusual line of advocacy. Arguing for his 3% interest, he ticked off foreign nations that have fared as well or better with U.S. loans: "Afghanistan pays 3% on its mutual-security-program loan. Burma paid 2⅜ on an overseas surplus property loan. Nationalist China under the mutual-security program has been paying 3%." Cried he: "It is beyond my understanding why grants to that extent and loans for economic development in the amount of more than $41 million can be extended...
When in 1947 the Italian government imposed a whopping tax on capital, Prince Pacelli and Count Pecci found themselves in an odd position. As Italian citizens, they were subject to the tax, but as diplomatic representatives of foreign powers they were specifically exempt. Experts at the Vatican State Secretariat studied the question, decided they should not have to pay, and the Vatican formally asked the Italian government to exempt them...
...then stop to wrangle and reminisce. As for characterization, the minor characters are mediocre comic types, and the old couple merely querulous and sad. Waiting for Godot was even more deficient in plot and character, as these terms are usually understood, but the newer work somehow misses the odd, grim delightfulness that exempted Godot from all the usual demands that are made on a play. All That Fall should be worth reading, and even studying, but in the theatre it cannot always keep the attention from wandering...
Since 1950, when Kind Hearts cleaned up at the art houses, British Cinemactor Guinness has steadily built his mass appeal in the U.S.-largely with his marvelously comical knack of hooking the odd fish. But his audience is not limited to moviegoers. As the star of hundreds of filler shows, which exhibit his comedies habitually, he is a stalwart TV attraction too. By the middle '50s, Guinness was pulling his TV audience into U.S. movie theaters, and movie publicists were bragging that, on the list of British exports, Guinness Stout was hardly as well known as Guinness, Alec; that...
Huxley and Waugh share many things apart from talent and an interest in drugs and religion (in Huxley's case mescaline and Vedanta, in Waugh's wine and Roman Catholicism). Each has a deep artistic integrity and an interest in odd characters -almost, unlike modern young men, to the exclusion of his own. If the '20s and '30s are remembered as nothing more than a dismal tract of history leading to present discontents, it will be partly because two wondrously articulate Fools were wiser than the lugubrious Lear of the tottering old order, whose motley they...