Word: scots
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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...
...outdo him in compassion. Greene's whisky-drinking, fornicating priest in revolution-torn Mexico could only try to make amends by persisting in God's work at the risk of his life. Father Bowles, the sinner of Michelfelder's Be Not Angry, is let off almost scot-free: since his vocation was not as strong as his male hunger for a woman, he is allowed to write off his priesthood and go with God to boot...
...treasury's pesetas all the way from Madrid to Bogota, Colombia, Riberaygua finally slipped back to Andorra, shamefaced and dead broke, to face the music. Last week, as he lounged around home at provisional liberty, Andorra's elders informally let drop their intentions: Riberaygua will probably go scot-free. After all. the Riberaygua family had almost gone bankrupt paying back what Ramon had stolen. Anyway, the four-cell jail in the Casa de la Vail might lose its appeal for tourists if it were cluttered up with a prisoner...
...Reston found them among the Chinese. Their unhappiness was translated, by Reston persuasion, into a stunning gift: the entire position papers of the Allied powers attending the conference. This was a smashing scoop, and any other reporter probably would have hurled the caboodle onto Page One. Instead, the canny Scot husbanded his riches, doling them out bit by bit, day by day, as the negotiations reached some point covered in his private file. The Department of State, in a mystified frenzy, falsely accused the British of leaking to Reston and protested to the Times and the FBI started investigating Reporter...