Word: often
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...congressional attitude toward Dwight Eisenhower. On strictly domestic issues-the budget, civil rights, etc.-the President has lost, or has forsworn, his political leverage despite his personal popularity on and off Capitol Hill. Congress' discovery: six months through his second term, he need no longer be feared, can often be ignored, occasionally flouted without fear of political reprisal...
...first of the three offerings, The Majesty of the Law, based on a short story by Frank O'Connor, is the tale of a village patriarch who suffers from an excess of pride. It is a feeling often easier to portray by word than to dissect on film. By the time the bearded old curmudgeon (well bellowed by Noel Purcell) presents himself at the local jail to do time for cudgeling an old enemy, the viewer has been made aware several times over that the old boy would rather cut off his beard than pay his ?5 fine...
...know just where the wind lay and the precise degree of humidity; around her bed were "a barometer, an outdoor thermometer . . . compasses . . . watches, chronometers, binoculars and magnifying glasses." After breakfast she would rush out into her garden like a starved animal. On visiting someone else's garden, she often "separated the sepals of flowers . . . smelled them . . . crumpled the leaves, chewed them, licked the poisonous berries and the deadly mushrooms . . . attracted bees and wasps, letting them alight on her hands and scratching their backs. 'They like that,' " she said. "Like a bacchante after libations," she would stumble along...
That the grim period from Dunkirk into the Battle of Britain brought out the most eccentric as well as the best qualities of the British is a major part of the thesis of Writer-Adventurer (Brazil, Tartary, etc.) Peter Fleming. The invasion-threatened British were often funny in the way in which a man, scrambling out of mortal danger, sometimes forgets his pants, and the Germans achieved heights of sinister absurdity. These facts, in focus with Fleming's sharp eye, make sprightly reading of what would otherwise be simply a well-organized and well-informed piece of contemporary narrative...
...More than Fantasy. Journalist Fleming, who, as Strix, writes a weekly essay for the Spectator, has composed a tragicomic record, a record in which the farcical is merely punctuation. If it is often the comic more than the serious that comes through, it is in part because of his own ingrown habit of mocking at perils-including his own-and, more important, because the world already knows well the sorrows and dangers and heroics that went into Great Britain's rise from disaster to victory, and needs no somber reiteration of them. Better, perhaps, to be able to smile...