Word: renowned
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Foul was the night, and black the situation. Four hundred desperate Spaniards, crammed captive in the hold, had rushed in dead of night upon their guards, seized bayonets, and sliced their way through British flesh to mastery of the H.M.S. Renown. The dawn lit a scarlet scene: human rubble on the decks, the scuppers running with gore, the Spaniards in command. Brave Lieut. Bush, bleeding from nine wounds, lay hidden after the melee behind a cannon's hulk. "What would England say?" he asked himself bitterly. "What would the navy say?" Ah God, if only Hornblower had been there...
...period between Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) and the high tides of action in Captain Horatio Hornblower (1939). It takes the young officer on a raiding expedition to the West Indies. A few days out, the captain goes mad, and has to be straitjacketed in quarters. Off Santo Domingo, the Renown runs aground as a Spanish fortress pounds her with red-hot cannonballs, but the "uncontrollable vigour" of young Hornblower saves the day. At his suggestion, a broadside fired at the fort jars the ship loose from the sucking sands; a night attack reduces the fort itself, and a brilliant flanking...
...things for Hornblower to do. By page 210 the hero is putting in shore time and doing it rather badly. For one thing, as all his fans will remember, Hornblower has an unarmored spot over his heart. "The man who fired the broadside that shook the Renown off the mud when under the fire of red-hot shot was helpless when confronted by a couple of women." The heroic bounder slinks out on an affair of the heart with his landlady's daughter, and while the lass tearfully presses his uniform, spends the last 50 pages of the book...
...cement in Los Angeles. The take, including record royalties, is $350,000 a year. The musicians, most of whom have been with Les five to ten years, earn around $10,000 apiece, and are settled family men with permanent homes around Los Angeles. This gives the Band of Renown a respectable pipe & slippers atmosphere, in contrast to the breathless, upper-berth days of the middle '30s, when Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Jimmie Lunceford rocketed around the U.S. with their big bands, collecting frenzied worship. In 15 years the band business has settled down, and chunky Les Brown...
...world where beat-and-swing-and-pack-'em-in no longer pays off, Les Brown advises: "Hire good men, make hit records, treat the men well, make hit records . . . hold on to the men, make hit records." For the Band of Renown, it works pretty well...