Word: sirs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pension, the response was outrage. Declared the Daily Mail: "When Marlborough, Churchill's illustrious ancestor, beat off England's enemies, the nation gave him Blenheim Palace. Is it too much to ask that Parliament, by speedy and special resolution, now grant a modest pension to Sir Winston's widow? That at least would be an act of belated grace...
...wants you to feel the tension. This is his show and you are the interloper here. The sign seems a smug reminder. The lights go up to reveal a harmless joke: the set is the public library in Zurich--I don't think you should talk during library hours, sir--especially if Mr. Joyce is over here up right center hard at work on Ulysses and Mr. Ulyanov is down left at work on revolution. But not to the public of 1918; if either man had turned to you with a warning finger to his lips in 1918 you might...
...done throughout history, will continue to toy with its would-be forecasters, embarrassing them with rain when they call for clear skies, drought when they predict precipitation. Indeed, the weatherman's plight will probably not change a millibar from that described by the English meteorologist Sir Napier Shaw. Wrote he: "A forecaster's heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger meddleth not with...
Last week Britain's literate and near-literate were howling to give the present P.L., Sir John Betjeman, the sack. The reason was the verse he had written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's reign. It was as if the mother tongue of Shakespeare and Milton had lapsed into baby talk. Betjeman's quatrains palpitated with cliches and such treacly rhymes as people/steeple, dutiful/beautiful and blue/true. Stanza 4 particularly captured the poem's schoolboy earnestness...
...Laurie Lee. Other critics less charitably called Betjeman's work "absolutely pathetic" and "nursery-rhyme gibberish." Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn vowed to write a superior poem (he could not), and the Sunday People invited schoolchildren to submit their efforts with the appeal, "Can YOU do better than Sir John...