Word: roundabout
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...title suggests, Mr. Scarborough has a thesis. He says that despite the fact that the Englishman does things by absurd roundabout methods, following antiquated ideas, the results are on the whole satisfactory and if they are not, the Britisher can, by his famous process of self-hypnosis, make himself believe that they are. This system of blundering about in a world of obsolete laws, political contradictions, and mid-Victorian conceptions of industry and trade is a tragic setting for a book, and even the numerous amusing anecdotes and descriptions of the Vagaries of the British mental process cannot make...
...obtained by his undercover men, one typed on the stationery of Amtorg, others with Moscow letterheads. Impartial observers wondered if here was another "Zinoviev Letter," like that which rocked British politics in 1924 and upset the first MacDonald Cabinet after it had recognized the Soviet Government. Crudely phrased, prolix, roundabout, the letters arrive awkwardly at these points: 1) One "Feodor" of Moscow writes to one "G. Grafpen," ordering him to go to "Seattle in the State of Washington," conferring on him a "mandate" respecting "illegal work," and continuing: "Between the 15th and 26th of March [1930] you will have...
...knows his wife has a lover, and she knows he knows who it is, but the old husband is a poor man in every way. Finally he persuades his wife in a roundabout manner to get money from her lover; she gives it to her penniless husband, and he goes off to the cafe to drink with his cronies...
...Teheran, Persia's capital, is at best an arduous trip of nearly 2,000 miles through primitive country. Last week Charles Calmer Hart, lately promoted from U. S. Minister to Albania to be U. S. Minister to Persia, was making this journey. But instead of traveling over long roundabout routes, he was shortcutting from post to post across Soviet Russia. The significance of his trip lay in the fact that he was the first U. S. diplomat to enter Russia officially in a dozen years...
Toward daybreak the gunmen took a grumpy departure. One of the prisoners had wriggled free, released his companions, spread the alarm. Police, detectives, Naval officials hastened to the scene. Roundabout the safe room were strewn nitroglycerine cans, percussion caps, crowbars, electric drills, gloves, an acetylene torch. The outer door of the massive safe, its lock drilled and mangled, was open. The inner door, dented, drilled, wrenched on its hinges, was shut. For three hours a safe expert knifed the steel door with an oxyacetylene torch, at last swung it open Potent though the raid had been, the $84.500 was intact...