Word: spartanism
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...Sale. Unlike many past shortages in Red China, these are not the result of a Spartan decision to export agricultural products in order to purchase machinery abroad. In the past few months Peking's trade offensive in Southeast Asia-which seriously worried the Japanese-has begun to falter badly. Fortnight ago Mao's government, despite its need for foreign exchange, canceled a contract to supply British firms with several thousand tons of cotton and cotton waste, and this breach of contract will jeopardize future negotiations...
...Coach") Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune, one of the burliest (230 Lbs.) sports writers and editors in the business, won a reputation as one of the best. When not engaged in playful mayhem-one favorite game of his was to sit across the table from some Spartan friend, trading shin kicks and guzzling highballs to numb the pain-he was busy beefing up the Trib's sports section, with a canny eye for talent. It was Coach Woodward who hired Sports Columnist Red Smith away from the Philadelphia Record in 1945. "I was also an awful popoff...
...once sickly child ("At the time, my navel was down-beamed"), Murata became fascinated as a young man with health fads, began delving into the Spartan training of the Zen Buddhist priests. By 1951, at the age of 55, he had built up a whole philosophy around the navel's influence on health. He started the Hesoten (literally, Navel Heaven) Society, swooped down upon factory and-office to proclaim that "the heaven-pointed navel receives blessings therefrom." The navel, he told his growing audiences, is "a medal of culture with which every person is born. Polish it. Value...
...independent thought ("I have a strong aversion to yes men"), has strong convictions on virtually everything from politics (far to the right) to television ("We are in danger of becoming a nation of watchers instead of doers"). He has been married for 33 years, lives a Spartan life in which he drinks little (a few Scotches now and then), eats little (no desserts, frequent salads and sandwiches), sleeps little (average: six hours), generally avoids social contacts with company people-and, for that matter, with just about everyone but his own family (four married daughters, ten grandchildren...
...Pistol Technique. The twelve years of retirement that followed were in some ways the most educational in De Gaulle's life. After abandoning active efforts at a political comeback in 1953, he continued to drive into Paris from Colombey once a week to hold court in his Spartan Left Bank office on the Rue de Solferino. And because he remained for many Frenchmen a kind of father figure, men of every political current called to confide in him. Without ever soliciting information, De Gaulle became perhaps the best-informed man in France on the inner workings and gaping inadequacies...