Word: squalidity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...rolled slowly through the Brussels traffic, drew up in the Marolles quarter. Three men climbed out: a cleric, a middle-aged official and a young man in a brown raincoat. They looked at the miserable shelter of a rags-and-flowers merchant, walked on through one of the more squalid slums of Europe. In one street they met a group of children. "It's the King!" cried a child. "How do you know it's the King?" "It must be. He has such nice shoes." The children shyly touched the young man's raincoat. Older people stared...
...have to preserve at least a semblance of party unity, behave politely to Opposition Leader Attlee and save his insults for Prime Minister Churchill, whom he once described as "a bloated bladder of lies." From across the way, Churchill would doubtless find him, as he had before, "a squalid nuisance...
Burning Oil. Next morning a sullen mob, recruited from Baghdad's slums and with scarcely a student in it, gathered at one end of squalid, narrow Rashid Street, in the heart of the city. Reds raced up & down like cheerleaders, whipping up the mob; one agitator showed the approved method of handling opposition by leaping at a parked bus and slashing its tires with a huge knife...
...Paris. She studied with Painters André Lhote and Fernand Léger in Paris, then moved down to the Riviera, where she rented Pablo Picasso's former apartment and tried doing modish abstractions. A few months later, she was traveling in North Africa, and there, in the squalid, poverty-stricken towns, she discovered what she wanted to do. "I began to see people in a way I had never seen them before. I put the abstractions in the bottom drawer and started painting people...
...sign posts. In ever-decreasing spirals you pursue them. Perhaps an accident of planning has left you an escape route, and you break out, breathless, into the welcome air of some more coal yards. But do not count on your escape. For eventually you must arrive at that squalid square where all the one-way signs point inward. It is a large area, teeming with unshaven men who will approach you and offer you fifty dollars spot cash for your car and throw in a train ticket to Boston; a square where cars go to die. Sell your car there...