Word: sirring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...necessarily profoundly different from that of Lindbergh's solitary flight. It costs billions of dollars, as against the $15,000 that Lindbergh spent. Astronauts, however highly trained, are nonetheless essentially cargo as they are flung out of gravity on a rocket's nib. The astronaut, says Sir George Greenfield, a literary agent who has specialized in accounts of explorations, "is more like a bus driver than an adventurer." The Viking spacecraft investigating Mars are made of thinking metal. The only humans aboard the Pioneer 10 spacecraft are the little sketches of a man and a woman that...
HERMIT OF PEKING: THE HIDDEN LIFE OF SIR...
...Peking, a model of historical detective work. The unfailingly literate sleuth is Hugh Trevor-Roper, author of The Last Days of Hitler and The Rise of Christian Europe, who has ventured far from his customary turf. In 1973, Trevor-Roper came upon two volumes of unpublished memoirs by Sir Edmund. The work appeared so outrageous, so incongruent with the accepted character of the author-it chronicled, in obscene detail, his amours with Chinese eunuchs and such European celebrities as Poet Paul Verlaine -that Trevor-Roper felt compelled to investigate the Backhouse background...
...Sir Edmund's autobiography scarcely seemed an ironclad source, so Trevor-Roper conducted his hunt elsewhere: in dusty Foreign Office records, in letters now reposing in Toronto, in files of U.S. and British companies. The exposé searched for an aberrant scholar and turned up a consummate rogue. Trapped by bad debts, Backhouse had dropped out of Oxford. In 1898 he showed up in China with faked references; 15 years later he shipped the Bodleian some 17,000 volumes of chinoiserie; later he contributed 18 manuscripts that were blatant forgeries and promised other treasures that did not exist. During...
...contemporary-pop-classical "The Life of Man" (Iyrics by Sir Walter Raleigh) provides a poignant adieu: "Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,/Only we die in earnest, that's no jest...