Word: spain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Orwell first discovered that there is no genuinely non-political language when he went to Spain in 1936. "Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.... This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world...
Dancer Holder credits the birth of his fast-moving career to his Negro father, a "salesman with brains" in Port of Spain, Trinidad, who said, "If you put the tools in front of the baby, the baby will walk up to the tools." One day daddy Holder went out and blew the rent money on a piano. Pretty soon Geoffrey's older brother, Boscoe, began to bang at the keyboard in the evenings, and Geoffrey copied him. When Boscoe developed a taste for painting and then for dancing, Geoffrey copied him again. Endowed with natural rhythm and a body...
...failed squire Varner, has become pregnant-though nobody is sure by whom. Varner marries her off to Flem Snopes, who advances from shortest-order cook to bank vice president, then moves up several more rungs of Jefferson's social ladder when he permits "Major" De Spain to cuckold him with Eula. His motives are Snopesean and Faulknerian: through a kind of sexual osmosis, he hopes that the Snopes family tree will flourish by association with the aristocratic De Spain. The gentle, white-haired local lawyer, Gavin Stevens (left over from Intruder in the Dust, etc.), loves Eula...
...minutes of Bach's Well Tempered Clavichord). Packed off to Barcelona to study, he played in a gambling casino to support himself. Said one awed casino patron: "He transformed a cage into a concert hall, and a concert hall into a temple." Eventually, Casals attracted the attention of Spain's Queen Mother, Maria Cristina. who invited him to play and compose at the court. Britain's Queen Victoria soon summoned him to London for a command performance. But his early success gave him little contentment. Tormented by the carnage of World War I, he contemplated suicide, finally...
Pilgrims at Prades. During the Spanish Civil War he was a passionate Loyalist. At war's end he exiled himself to "the village of Prades (pop. 5,400) in Southern France, where he spent much of his time and money helping refugees from Franco Spain. For a decade the world heard little of Pablo Casals' music; in 1947 he vowed never to appear in public so long as Franco ruled Spain. When Sir Stafford Cripps invited him to England to explain why Great Britain supported Franco, Casals refused, commented: "He would talk politics; I am talking morals...