Word: sirs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sir John Davis' 13-year tenure as chairman of Britain's Rank Organization (annual sales: $600 million) has long seemed a corporate version of the reign of Henry VIII. A 68-year-old, 202-lb. former accountant and veteran of five marriages, Davis ran the company like a Renaissance monarch: he insisted on deciding personally minute details like the design of an invitation card to a company party, and became known as "the executioner" for his summary firings of scores of lesser executives. The latest and most notable casualty occurred in September, when Sir John...
Enter Dowson, a onetime R. A.F. pilot, Tupelo, Miss, disk jockey and Davis protege, whom Sir John last October promoted from deputy chief to chief executive. Dowson rapidly concluded he would never have real authority as long as Sir John was around. Finding himself unable to challenge Davis in a boardroom battle, he apparently decided to opt for a lucrative early retirement by taking on Sir John in a bedroom farce...
...artists. Pound and Joyce no less than Picasso, Stravinsky or André Breton. John, however, continued to paint like a swashbuckling hedonist. His drawings of the figure had dash and virtuosity, even in his student years at the Slade School. He was, in the view of friends like Sir William Orpen, the inordinately successful painter, the best draftsman to work in England since Van Dyck. The last modern painter to affect John's work was Paul Gauguin, whose flat, hieratic patterning was echoed in decorative figure compositions. John's favorite subjects remained the two main women...
...century dandy about Donleavy, born 49 years ago in New York City and now living in a large Georgian house on a 180-acre cattle farm in Ireland. There is more than a touch of stately grandiloquence to the Donleavy prose, with its Latinate preferences and its "My-dear-sir!" bursts of lace-cuff-shooting mock elegance. But what the cadenced prose does is to set up the reader for the moment when Donleavy belches out his violent, scurrilous message: life, taken all in all, is obscene-the ultimate four-letter word...
...writes maxims on social climbing, marrying for money and the fine art of suing: "If you can spot a lawyer's letter without opening it and can return it marked deceased, this is a trump card. If you cannot suppress your desire to reply, then state, 'Dear Sir, Only for the moment I am saying nothing...