Word: squalidity
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...decided to stick it out. Through the moonlit sky roared a squad of Japanese bombers, plunked incendiary bombs on the capital's poorer districts. Three times they returned, until the more congested quarters of the city were in flames. One hundred and fifty coolies, trapped in squalid mud huts, were burned alive...
There in a squalid hovel of mats she teaches her children to beg, goes out alone in the midst of rioting to help loot a rich merchant's house. Though trampled and nearly shot, she gets away with a pouch of jewels. She gives them to Wang, keeping only two pearls-"not to wear-I am too plain-but to look at when I am alone...
...about Banjo On My Knee is that the tunes never separate the story from its pattern but are cued in so as to help the feeling. It also permits able Helen Westley who, as a stand-by of the New York Theatre Guild, was noted for her interpretation of squalid roles, to reach a new low in this respect. A shabby pioneer in Green Grow the Lilacs, a harlot's mother in They Shall Not Die, she appears in Banjo On My Knee as a superannuated female river-rat, mewing & spitting, scratching at her naked, knobbled feet...
...same object through a single pair of binoculars: when it is in focus for one, it is blurred and out of perspective to the other. Two years ago two British writers, one a Glasgow slum dweller, the other a London journalist, turned their imaginative spyglass on the squalid, violent Gorbols section of Glasgow, on the south bank of the Clyde. Last week they reported on what they had seen, in a strange uneven book that suggested they could not quite agree on their findings. They saw horrors galore, filth, brutality, misshapen creatures of an unknown kind, a few recognizable human...
...Last week, in Los Angeles, frustrated, 50-year-old Mrs. Lowe published a lurid booklet named Truth to air her grievances. Twenty-three pages long, Truth is illustrated by photographs of Indian Barnett before and after marriage. In one set he is a dirty old codger living in a squalid hut. In the other he has a shave, a new coat, a mansion, Anna Laura Lowe. Her conclusion: "Jackson Barnett was the smartest and best one of the Indians. He married better and lived better than all the other Indians combined. His eyesight, hearing, memory and intelligence were excellent...