Word: secondbest
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...novel whose first-person heroine, Sister Ursula, obviously walks in the footsteps of Monica Baldwin. Unhappily, Author Baldwin's story of a nun who misjudges her vocation also treads close on the path of Kathryn Hulme's The Nun's Story, and by comparison comes off secondbest. Such fascination as it has lies in the book's embittered documentation of a nun's daily round and the romantic-escapist character of Sister Ursula who acts like an adolescent schoolgirl at the stage door of heaven waiting for God's autograph...
...part it foreshadowed the revolt of the natural man against an age of prudery. Compared to his friend Dickens, the English writing colossus of the century, Collins was a minor Victorian, but in the sense that Marlowe is a minor Elizabethan alongside Shakespeare. He was the best of the secondbest, and his growing status as "must" reading for highbrow novelists has been signalized by a T. S. Eliot essay. This biography by Nuel Pharr Davis, a University of Illinois English instructor, is intellectually skimpy, but as a personal history of Collins it is thorough, which may be just as well...
...nourishes an old-fashioned taste for the back court, for stylish strokes, for careful strategy worked out through a long, exciting exchange of shots. Such tactics seldom stand a chance against the "big" game of today's champions-and until this week Ken had a habit of finishing secondbest. Smooth, fast-paced ground shots may be lovely to look at, but most of the time they add up to little against a booming serve backed by the ability to come up fast and put away a volley...
Simone went on to the Sorbonne, where she finished secondbest, in competition for a top graduate degree (1929), to a student named Jean-Paul Sartre. From that time on, the two have seldom been long separated...
Even the most ardent Republican readily admits that the U.S. has been through a recession. But despite the Democrats' gloomy cries about a "secondbest year," the most remarkable fact about the dip is that it was just about the mildest recession in U.S. history. While in some places, notably in Detroit and in New England's mill towns, unemployment has been acute, in terms of the total work force it has been small. The highest jobless total was 3,700,000 v. more than 4,000,000 in 1949. Last week the Government reported the figure...