Word: scotland
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When it happened, I was driving through northern Scotland in a rented car finding how utterly disorienting it was to work out of the right-hand seat. After a day of laboriously scanning Loch Ness for the Great Orm, I sat down with a British newspaper and a friend to read "Police Arrest 179 at Harvard." It might have been any other school, save for the comparatively big play and for a few proper nouns. I had often been instructed not to use the word "campus" in connection with Harvard, for Harvard was not supposed to have a campus...
...undertook a 1,100-mile hike from one end of Britain to the other. In the course of it, he managed to be fogbound on Dartmoor, musclebound in Bristol and sodden in Somerset. He was rained upon almost everywhere (though not, oddly, at a place in Scotland called Hill of Drip), making clear why one of the few Gaelic words he picked up en route was fliuch. It is pronounced, he says, "floo-chh" and it means...
...Scotland's Jackie Stewart is something of a brooding fatalist. His elder brother Jimmy preceded him as a racing driver but retired after two serious accidents and a near-fatal collision in the 1954 Le Mans classic. In 1968 his roommate and closest friend, the incomparable Jim Clark, was killed in a crash on the Hockenheim circuit. "The loss of Jimmy was an enormous blow," says Stewart, "but it couldn't make me give up racing. Jimmy was a professional...
...then thrown away." He blamed the Emperor Domitian, who in A.D. 84 suddenly ordered his brilliant field commander Agricola to return to Rome just when a wholly Roman Britain seemed within grasp of the legions. Thereafter, year by year, the troops that had pressed nearly to the top of Scotland fell back under guerrilla attacks from the Britons. At last, in A.D. 119, Rome decided to stem the retreat and make the best of things by building a wall...
...record, both men are classic American types, sprung to eminence from provincial poverty by their own exertions: Daniel from a soda-jerking job in Zebulon, N.C., Reston via an impoverished childhood in Scotland and a U.S. boyhood in the Midwest, partly spent working as a caddie. Readers in search of profundities and nuances will be more satisfied with the portrait of Reston, perhaps because Talese implies that Daniel's surface is Daniel. Reston's Horatio Alger idealism and Establishment pieties Talese wryly ascribes to a successful immigrant's fervor for his new-found land. In assessing...