Word: perfectability
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Templer is the perfect picture of a British regular soldier: an austere, stiff-backed autocrat in uniform-and in mufti a bit of a dandy. He lived elegantly in London's Belgravia and became a connoisseur of claret, crystal and ijth century books. But in the company of his old war comrades he could relax. Says one: "He'll bring along an elderly fellow in civilian attire and introduce him to the officers as 'You remember Sergeant So-and-So. He and I fought together at So-and-So.' Sometimes if you happen to mention...
...Neutral Jungle. The basic fact about the war in Malaya is the jungle. "The 'thing that astonished me most," writes Colonel F. Spencer . Chapman, an Englishman who spent three years there in World War II behind the Japanese lines, "was the absolute straightness, the perfect symmetry of the tree trunks, like the pillars of a dark and limitless cathedral. The ground itself was covered with a thick carpet of dead leaves and seedling trees. There was practically no earth visible, and certainly no grass or flowers. Up to a height of ten feet or so, a dense undergrowth...
From any other boy of ten, the letter might have sounded fantastic, but not from young John Acton. "I am a perfect linguist," he wrote his mother one day in 1844, "knowing perfectly . . . English, French, German, and can almost speak Latin. I can speak a few words of Chinese, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Irish. I also know Chemistry, Astronomy, Mechanics, and many other sciences, but do not know botany ... I am in a hurry, therefore good...
Igor Youskevitch took up dancing at the age of twenty-four and, within a decade, has become the foremost classical ballet artist in this country. His double pirouettes in the Pas de Deux from The Nutcracker were so brilliant and perfect that he appeared suspended above the stage. And his control and grace in slower movements compare only with Andre Eglevsky of City Center...
Those Old Arabs. Sam Katzman, a bouncy, bulb-shaped 51, has his own formula for keeping his earning record perfect. His five sound stages (at Columbia's dingy old subsidiary studio) are usually buzzing with assorted pygmies, giants, animals (wild and tame), half-dressed women (wild & wild-eyed), cowboys and pâpier-maché interplanetary vehicles. With these props Sam can roll into a picture at the drop of a dollar. Says he: "We don't get stories. We get titles and then write stories around them or to fit them. For instance, we had this title...