Word: scots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sooner or later, readers of Muriel Spark's fiction come to understand that they have been hornswoggled in the very nicest way. The tactics of this talented Scot are essentially those of the confidence man. The Spark reader is entertained by an apparently straightforward, witty story-until the moment arrives when the rug is twitched from beneath his feet, or when a corps of spooks, bogies and supernatural agents start moving the furniture about, playing the devil with the shapes of common objects...
...built up an impressive record of courtroom success. Items: Chippy handled 401 cases of homicide. "Even with 'cop killers,'" reports the author, "regarded by all living policemen as bloodstains on their shields, he did rather well." Chippy handled 25 such defendants; five of them got off scot-free, 15 went to prison, only five went to the chair. In the remaining 376 cases, Chippy won 166 acquittals; 207 of his clients went to jail for an average of only six years apiece; only three were executed...
Englishmen, who recall that nine of "their" Prime Ministers since the mid-18th century have been Scots, find this Scottish sense of grievance hard to understand. Last week, noting that Prime Minister Macmillan, Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, Foreign Secretary Lord Home, the chairman of the London Stock Exchange and a clutch of Britain's biggest tycoons are all Scotsmen, London's Tatler declared: "There are those who maintain that the Act of Union has turned out to be more of a Scottish takeover bid." But the Scots have an answer to that one, too. "Once a Scot goes...
What most infuriates Scotsmen is the notion that they are just backwoods Englishmen. Nearly 95,000 Scots still speak Gaelic and 2,000 speak no English. Scots cherish their own, dour Calvinistic church and their distinctive, Roman-influenced legal system, which features 15-man juries, permits the un-English verdict of "not proven"-meaning "we know you did it, but we haven't got enough to pin it on you." With justice, Scotsmen boast that their school system (which teaches the Scottish slant on British history) is superior to England's. The true Scot scorns such English institutions...
...cancer; in Portland. Of all his multiple interests, the indefatigable MacNaughton most relished his unpaid post at endowment-dwindling Reed. Ending about every extravagance except the famed twelve-man classes ("We don't want to water down our professors with students"), the blustery Scot, a self-styled "Republican with a move on," badgered his conservative friends into unprecedented contributions to what they had long considered "those Reed pinkos," put the college in the black for the first time in years...