Word: oxonian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like pro wrestling, this fight is most interesting for its colorful combatants, and it's hard to know whom to root for. Hitchens is a tweedy contrarian from the British upper classes, a page of Evelyn Waugh brought to Washington. His Oxonian socialism led him to bash Princess Diana after her death and demonize Mother Teresa in a scathing book. The sharp-elbowed Blumenthal made enemies as a rabidly pro-Clinton journalist, and even more as the Clintons' lofty--some would say supercilious--ambassador to the White House press corps. But the real question is Who's winning? Hitchens took...
...confident... He had to be the youngest Governor in the country at that time...and I just remember him as being very attractive," says Starr. "There was a buzz about him in the elevator. Here was a very accomplished person with all these fabulous credentials: Georgetown and Rhodes, an Oxonian, and then Yale Law School, and here he was, you know, a very young Governor of a state that I had spent some time in, and so I had that sense of connection...
There is half-joking talk of over-throwing the ruling class and storming High Table, but that would be so indecorous--so un-Oxonian. It is understood clearly that we should feel privileged to sit here in the resonance of so many before us. We play our part...
Yale's physical beauty is of the same stock one encounters scurrying through Oxonian pathways to ancient College courtyards. Richly detailed gargoyles and grotesques touched daily by the hands of future presidents, the blast of electric guitars shaking lead-framed windows, and colorful cloth Dramat banners flailing in the crisp New England breeze are all the stuff of Yale...
Still, Memoirs is not all misanthropy and -ogyny. Amis gives a generous portrait of his shy, witty fellow Oxonian, the poet Philip Larkin, who like the author had to endure that most mannered of academic dons, Lord David Cecil. One sprightly chapter contains a mercilessly comic imitation of a lisping Cecil pointlessly beginning a lecture. ("When we say a man looks like a poet . . . dough mean . . . looks like Chauthah?") Cecil had the ill grace to flunk Amis for his B. Litt. thesis, but the author uncharacteristically lets bygones be. Perhaps it's too hard to stay angry with someone...