Word: speakers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" The speaker, a blimpish Hollywood Britisher in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, sucked petulantly on his whisky & soda and stared at his outdated copy of Horizon, Cyril Connolly's British monthly for intellectuals. If he had lived long enough to investigate the matter, he might have wondered how Scottie Wilson, a half-educated furniture dealer turned artist, had ever made his list of the big guns in the 20th Century highbrow arsenal in the first place...
Fortified by his experience with the debating society, Sid Perelman has become a kind of secretary of society in general-the kind who doodles in the minutes book, makes faces at the principal speaker, and sneaks out in the middle of the meeting. Of late years, Perelman has done little more than sift the ashes of his satire (at considerably more than 30? an hour). Listen to the Mocking Bird contains a heap of clinkers, but enough live coals (Mortar and Pestle, and some book reviews) to keep Perelmaniacs hopping...
...answer to the Senators, but the House wasn't listening. Since the Senate wouldn't agree to a formal adjournment, the House had another out: it would simply start a series of three-day recesses, which require no Senate approval. For the next four weeks. Speaker Sam Rayburn announced, only a corporal's guard would need to stay in town-someone to act as Speaker, a functionary to parade the mace (which is the symbol of House authority), and someone to move adjournment every day after the journal has been approved...
...Vainly, Speaker Sam Rayburn got down on the floor himself to plead for "the whole loaf, not half a loaf." Such economizing, Rayburn cried, was just another sample of the "same caution, the same hesitation, the same wait-awhile" of prewar isolationism. "There's more talk around here about Communism, but it's a funny thing that when we start to do something about it those speaking the loudest against Communism are found wanting...
...their elaborate efforts to provide a worthy council hall, the French finally abandoned their plan of installing a marble copy of the Medici Venus directly above the speaker's rostrum. Explained French Architect Bernard Monnet: "It would have shocked the British." Instead of Venus, he chose a discreetly robed Minerva. That was perhaps symbolic. The Council would not succeed through love; if it accomplished anything, it would do so in the ways of Minerva, a hardheaded and practical woman...