Word: oxfordized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...than coincidence that Houston Harte, Texas newspaper publisher, happened to choose one of our artists to illustrate his selection of the best stories in the Old Testament. For some years he had been collecting the originals of the TIME portraits of Texans-who have appeared on our cover. When Oxford University Press agreed to publish the Old Testament stories, Publisher Harte wanted them illustrated in the new kind of journalistic portraiture that TIME and its cover artists had developed. Of our cover artists (the others are, of course, Ernest Hamlin Baker, Boris Artzybasheff and Boris Chalia-pin), Rowe...
...conceded that, academically, Oxford was topnotch and that things like "Magdalen Deer Park on a medium cloudy day" were pretty fine. But as for everything else, mourned Burdick: "Youf writers have lifted the illusion so high, and war, proximity, and perhaps even the dollar shortage have forced reality...
...Sparkle. Burdick had expected that debates at the Oxford Union would be brilliant occasions in which "wildly precocious youths, their eyes firmly fixed on the main chance in Parliament, debate with cruelly deflating epigrams and puncture windy arguments with sly thrusts." The union would be a "symbol of English upper-class intellectual ability; disenchanted, shrewd, sophisticated, always witty." Actually, he decided, the union was full of stuttering youths, "red-faced with effort ... It is not witty. It does not sparkle...
Burdick had looked vainly for the early '20s Oxford of Novelist Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited') where the "subtly homosexual youth . . . carries his teddy bear about St. John's Quad . . . boys roar out into the country in Bentley roadsters, and over Cointreau and plovers' eggs have some dazzling conversations "about God and Truth." But, said Burdick, "Times have changed since Waugh was here. The Oxford homosexual today has neither wittiness nor creative eccentricity to recommend him . . Parties revolve around gin and orange which is, beyond question, one of the most barbaric drinks that any people ever accepted...
Burdick wanted it understood that his criticisms had nothing to do with the way he had been treated at Oxford. "The anti-Americanism of Oxford is complex and subtle, [but] the sting [has been] taken out of it by the fact that it is fashionable to have an American friend. Perhaps it is for the same reason that the courts used to find the muscular slow-witted barbarian from Asia a curiosity and a comfort to have about. The role is somewhat uncertain, but it is interesting...