Word: swift
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Pearl Harbor 6½ years ago, the provocation was simple, swift and beyond recall: Japanese bombs hit U.S. battleships in a matter of seconds. In Berlin last week provocation had a longer fuse. By blocking the normal food supply of some 2,500,000 people in Berlin's western zones (see col. 2), the Russians were betting that they could force the Western Allies out in a matter of days or weeks...
...PORTABLE SWIFT (601 pp.)-Edited by Carl Van Doren-Viking...
...Gulliver is one of the permanent and self-contained creations of literature. But it has a context, and the context enriches it. In reprinting Gulliver's Travels entire for this "portable" edition, Editor Van Doren has surrounded it with earlier and later examples of the prose of Jonathan Swift-a prose that for polished, deadly decorum and energy in satire no writer has ever equaled. Van Doren's introduction also supplies the chief facts about the battles -literary and political-in which Swift fought with all his gall...
...Swift held politicians in scorn, but served two of them-the Tory Lords Bolingbroke and Oxford-so as to sway a kingdom. He despaired of mankind, but his friendships with Addison, Arbuthnot, Pope and Gay were among the happiest of the age. Women disgusted him, but he loved one woman all his life. Exiled from England to the deanery of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he conquered, with Gulliver (1726), the world he wished to shame. And though he detested Ireland, he wrote so fiercely in her defense (in The Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal...
...used to being led around by the nose anyway, but also because they are not automatically prejudiced, like many of their elders, against unfamiliar sights. The adults are apt to be casual but hostile. They often seem to "feel the museum's educational duty is comparable to a swift tour of Chinatown...