Word: swifts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Jordan is just a wide spot in the desert, with little claim to nationhood. But in one of those swift shifts of international politics, this vacuum in the sand has become the center of the storm, buffeted about by all the angry winds now loose in the Middle East. On one side press the claims of Iraq, its fellow Hashemite nation, and of Britain, its protector and sponsor, asking Jordan to side with the West. On the other side press Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, out to frustrate the West, arousing passions by inflammatory broadcasts, buying agitators, and receiving...
Freeman tied for first going into the final round of the tournament, then met and lost to Mednis in what he termed "a swift and not very beautiful debacle." "My win over Lyman was very unfortunate," Freeman said, "for I had no chance of winning...
...seemed to have fixed everything. But the bloody slogans of church-state and King-Commons still echoed in English ears, and men who no longer wished to hear a bugle or a Mass would listen to Handel, conversation, politics and smut. Often they listened to the Very Rev. Jonathan Swift, Anglican dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin, a man who could use the English language like a whip and was, in the words of his latest biographer, John Middleton Murry, "one of the most difficult men that ever God created...
...first, as secretary and protege of the retired but influential courtier-statesman Sir William Temple, he seemed to see the world at his feet. Then came the inevitable slur, or imagined slur, for Swift had the thinnest of skins. He left Temple's protection only to learn that pride is a luxury to the poor. Then a kinsman, the great John Dryden, saw his verses and said: "Cousin Swift . . . nature has never formed you for a Pindaric poet." At 26 he entered holy orders "as [one joins] a regiment." He was tormented by pride and used this...
...Swift died at 77 in agony (at the onset of his final illness five men were needed to hold him in his bed). The inscription on his tomb in Dublin's St. Patrick's says that "the body of Jonathan Swift . . . is buried here, where fierce indignation [saeva indignatio] can lacerate his heart no more." To this great and terrible man, Biographer Murry says, death was "not the opening of a gate but the closing of a wound...