Word: sirs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nine-month revenues: $60.7 billion), the mammoth British and Dutch energy producer, sought to buy out minority owners of its Houston-based Shell Oil subsidiary. Royal Dutch offered $55 a share, or $5.2 billion, for the approximately 30% of the U.S. firm that it does not already own. Said Sir Peter Baxendell, Royal Dutch senior executive: "This will enable us to invest and operate within the U.S. and abroad without any obstructions that might result from the presence of minority shareholders...
...helped chart BL's new direction is its former chairman, Sir Michael Edwardes, 53, a 5-ft. 2-in. South African whom the London Times called "Diminutive Dr. Death." In 1977 Edwardes inherited a ragtag company that was racked with heavy losses, chronic labor problems, aging automobile designs, inefficient factories and low productivity...
Edwardes left in November 1982, and will become chairman of International Computers Ltd. this spring. His legacy to BL includes a talented management team, among them his successor, Sir Austin Bide, 68, and John Egan, 43, who was recruited in 1980 from Massey-Ferguson, the farm-equipment maker, to head BL's sputtering Jaguar division. In 1980 Jaguar was losing $1.5 million a week, and its sleek models had acquired a well-deserved reputation for shoddy workmanship and unreliability. Egan cut Jaguar's work force by nearly 30% and helped improve labor relations by holding family gatherings...
...Huntley and Chancellor, Presidents and potential Presidents were treated with some deference. Dan Rather's defiance of Nixon, scandalous at the time, began the real change. Now the preferred style is a harrying, rapid-fire crossexamination, not hostile but not chummy either. The masters are Ted Koppel ("But, sir, you haven't answered my question"), Bill Monroe, Sam Donaldson. They allow their subjects no easy outs or blurred distinctions. It's show time. Mixed in with these are opinionated questioners, such as George F. Will and Robert Novak, who bring decided views over from their editorial-page...
...live to see machines do it." But that was merely Noël the singer. There was also Noël the playwright, Noël the actor, Noël the director, Noël the short-story writer, Noël the memoirist and, at the end, Sir Noël, knight of the British Empire. Yet of all his roles, Coward is likely to be remembered best as the songwriter with a taste for the bittersweet. Like Porter, he shied from passionate expression, sometimes in the belief that love, like moonlight, was "cruelly deceptive"; sometimes because...