Word: oxonians
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Oxford, he wrote (signing himself simply "Oxonian"), had become a hotbed of fascism. "Rather smart young men" with a taste for "fast cars and camel-hair coats" were displaying the books of Sir Oswald Mosley on their tables. They could be heard saying at their private binges that "soon we shall all have to be fascists, whether we like...
...Greenness of Grass. What had happened to Oxford-or that splinter of it that "Oxonian" had stubbed his toe on? "Oxonian" thought one man was largely to blame-a wan and wispy philosopher named Alfred Jules ("Freddie") Ayer. Ayer's book, Language, Truth and Logic, had "acquired almost the status of a philosophic Bible" at Oxford. It insisted that "value judgments" of beauty and goodness were, philosophically speaking, nonsense. They were moral sentiments, not facts at all. Such heresies, "Oxonian" thought, left no place for human values, created the moral void fascism required...
Somewhat against its better judgment, Chapman & Hall, the London publishing house of which Evelyn's father was head, had brought out his first slim, satiric novel, Decline and Fall. It was a lighthearted little tale of moral turpitude about a young Oxonian named Paul Pennyfeather, who became a teacher without qualifications in one of fiction's most fascinating schools for backward children. He was on the point of marrying Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, the mother of one of his pupils, when he was thrown into jail. It had come to the notice of the vigilant police that Mrs. Beste...
...Majesty's Colonel Ray Milland can't quite get acclimated to. Rollywood's favorite ninepin, Marlene Dietrich. He's busy looking for Professor Grosig and the formula for a poison gas. In fact, all your old friends are here: the fat German with a sear, the brave little Oxonian who is tortured while keeping his chin up, the big sex-appeal Gypsy boy with a tern shirt and 33 children, the usual retinue of glum Nazi henchmen, and, last, but not least, the genial white horse that wiggles its ears. You can't forget those gypsy kisses that's what...
...intense family man, and a curiosity among show people because he begins to yawn around 11 p.m. He has patiently steered his children* through their emotional mumps and ideological measles (bursts of radicalism here, seizures of Oxonian ambitions there). He is their idol, up to a point. When son Jimmy, at 13, wrote a piece of music (he goes in for pretty serious stuff), his mother suggested that he show it to Dad. "Aw," said Jimmy, "he'd just want to write the lyrics...