Word: parkinson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Author C. Northcote Parkinson [June 14] should be flogged around the fleet for suggesting that Hornblower was responsible for the timely death of H.M.S. Renown's dread Captain Sawyer. Any Hornblower student worth his salt pork knows that the most likely author of Sawyer's assist down the hatchway was Henry Wellard. Wellard is known to have suffered repeatedly under Sawyer's sadistic paranoia, and was described as "highly agitated" on the night of the incident. The testimony of the Marine corporal, Greenwood, places Wellard with Hornblower near the hatchway, and both Marine Captain Whiting and Lieut...
...Duke of Wellington), or speculates that she, too, may have enjoyed a brief liaison with Baron von Neffzer in Vienna in 1815-when Hornblower and the Vicomtesse de Graçay were temporarily holding Bonaparte's regulars at bay along the Loire. A similar tact touches Professor Parkinson's handling of the then Lieutenant Hornblower's heretofore unsuspected murder of Captain David Sawyer (H.M.S. Renown, 74 guns) on the West Indies station in 1800.* A pedant or a gross popularizer would have made much of the incident, but Parkinson, clearly not wanting to perplex inattentive readers, presents...
...Professor Parkinson's painstaking work has a weakness, it lies in its treatment of all those already well-known, oftretold Hornblower adventures-in quarterdeck and boudoir-that did so much to confound Great Britain's enemies in the Napoleonic Wars. It was Horatio Hornblower's peculiar character to combine brilliant seamanship and a calculating mind with such inner ravages of self-doubt that though he never lost a battle-or very rarely so-it always seemed he was about to. From a score of perilous voyages one may perhaps recall the long patrol to Latin America...
Perhaps out of deference to his lofty subject, in the retelling of this familiar feat, and all the others, which necessarily make up a large portion of his story, Parkinson customarily confines himself to a somewhat plodding, precis narrative. As a result, his biography may be mainly read by Hornblower scholars who wish, as it were, to set their very stuns'ls in pursuit of their elusive literary quarry. As for the rest of us, one is put in mind of the French Gourmet Brillat-Savarin, who was once offered grapes for dinner. "Non, merci" he briskly replied...
...Parkinson's first law about the proliferation of paper-shufflers, in fact, was born when he discovered that while the number of British Navy vessels dwindled from 62 to 20 between 1914 and 1928, the number of shore-bound Admiralty officials nearly doubled during the same period. *Naval scholars may remember that Sawyer, a sadist who mistreated his crew, mysteriously fell into a hatch, doing himself permanent injury, and soon thereafter was killed by a mob of Spanish prisoners who temporarily took over the Renown. It now appears that Hornblower both pushed Sawyer down the hatch and later...