Word: swifts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...upon a time there was a small and shy boy named Jay who lived in a huge house. Its 32 rooms were filled with tapestries and wood carvings. In an enormous library with shelves from floor to ceiling, he could curl up and read Dickens and Stevenson and Tom Swift. Best of all, tucked in a corner of the garden was a little cave where Jay used to sit for hours and imagine that it had once belonged to King Arthur. In the evening, he and his family discussed literature, and sometimes Jay made up stories for them...
Amis includes a respectable swatch of Jonathan Swift speculating on his coming demise and of T.S. Eliot musing on cats ("Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,/ There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity"). John Betjeman, England's reigning poet laureate, displays a light touch at vers de société; Robert Graves is captured in several nonmythic moods. A couple of songs by Nöel Coward read less jauntily than they sing. Auden the anthologist did not let Auden the splendid comic poet into his book. Amis generously corrects this blunder...
...come to expect. It was simply not the kind of year that could support all the familiar, pat theories of student apathy, the creeping "new mood" of preprofessionalism, the old refrain that "change at Harvard always proceeds with glacial speed." It was, in fact, a year filled with relatively swift changes--in both the structure and attitudes that shape student life. The years of retrenchement, of building up scar tissue over the wounds of the last decade, seemed finally...
...next in line to rule.) Last August, faced with discontent over the skyrocketing cost of living and government-ordered power cutbacks that caused several hundred million dollars in industrial losses, the Shah named Jamshid Amuzegar, 54, the country's tough oil and energy negotiator, as Premier. Amuzegar took swift action against inflation (down from 31% last August to 15% today). He also curbed public spending and real estate speculation, decentralized government offices and acted to bring down the cost of housing. Claiming that subversive elements were using religious organizations as a cover, Amuzegar said last week that the government...
...recaptured by Zaïre troops. At week's end the rebel hold on the city was broken and a mass airlift of refugees began. For some the aid came too late. Paratroopers found clusters of bodies, and survivors told of mock trials on street corners followed by swift executions. Some Zaïre soldiers who had fallen into rebel hands had been killed the same...