Word: scenes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nasty kettle of fish: a member of Gideon's staff has taken hush money from a dope ring. Gideon rushes off to the office, rips the lettuce off his lapsed subordinate, sends out the alert for a sex murderer from Manchester. Then he looks in at the scene of a payroll robbery, gets word that the inspector he sacked has been killed by a passing car, discovers that the same car was used in the payroll job. Puzzled, he rushes off to testify about something or other at Old Bailey, but the case gets clearer when he checks...
...Civil War novel, all the fighting takes place offstage, and the Yankee invaders are vehemently discussed but never seen. As the fortunes of the South decline, John Bottomley whips his jaded horse into a final gallop that gets him back to Pompey's Head for a last big scene in which he accepts a dying Negro as his illegitimate half-uncle and watches the family mansion burn to the ground, consuming Villain Monckton in the process. Penniless, but at last united in wedlock. John and Arabella are prepared to face together the perils of Reconstruction-just as soon...
...years ago Britain's Nancy Mitford wittily divided the social scene into U (for Upper Class) and non-17. Things are not that simple in the U.S., and in Author Packard's scheme there are Real U and Semi-U, both belonging to the college-bred "Diploma Elite"; then there are the "Supporting Classes,'' in turn subdivided into Limited-Success. Working Class and Real Lower (in his definitions, Packard rarely gets much more precise than to say that the Diploma Elite consists of "the big, active, successful people who pretty much run things" ). This structure, asserts...
Interesting though much of Packard's evidence may be, it never really proves his basic point that U.S. class lines are hardening. In fact it suggests just the opposite-a continually changing social scene. At one point Packard himself concedes that the "American populace [is] arranged along a continuum [with] a series of bulges and contractions." Much of what Packard describes as status seeking is indeed foolish, and some of it may be evil; but much of it is also the result of man's human status, and the product of a free and mobile society...
...Blackymor," he was a scarred African Negro called James Montgomery-Majoribanks, who traveled about western Ireland peddling patent medicine. White hired the medicine man, who doubles as a masseur, to unstiffen the rusted joints of two rheumatic old villagers. The healing scene is comical, but writing of it, White manages to convey the dignity of the two crippled ancients and the courage of the lonely, ridiculous African. The story ends with a clink and a gurgle. "Our faces glowing with liquor, our eyes more flashing, our tongues volubly tripping and repeating, we had great concert of talk and narrative, admiring...