Word: swifts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ever since 1789 when Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated swift and painless decapitation as a way to put people to death, the guillotine, designed by others, has served as a uniquely French form of capital punishment. During the French Revolution hundreds of heads were lopped off, and the crowds came early to get a good view of such victims as Danton and Robespierre. In all, the guillotine was used some 4,600 times. Public executions were banned in 1939. In the past decade, the blade fell only six times, the most recent in Sept. 1977 when Hamida Djandoubi was dispatched...
...three publishers and three managing editors-Gruner & Jahr sold their ad-starved, troubled magazine to Knapp Communications (Architectural Digest, Bon Appetit). In exchange, Gruner & Jahr promised to help test-market Knapp's other magazines in Europe. Predicts President Cleon Knapp, who quickly named former New West Executive T. Swift Lockhard as Geo's fifth publisher: "We're not going to report on the sordid part of our world We're going to celebrate it." Also on his mind: drop The Earth Diary subtitle and lower that forbidding newsstand price...
Foot's newest book, his eleventh, reflects that very amplitude of intellectual riches and experience. Debts of Honour is Foot's ode to his political and literary heroes, in 14 fond chapter-biographies. Those idols range from Benjamin Disraeli and Thomas Paine to the Duchess of Marlborough and Jonathan Swift, His heroes usually share one trait: a determined foresight. As he writes in his profile of Disraeli, "the good Tory": "If anything is really to be done in the world, it must be done by visionaries; men who see the future, and make the future because they...
...single movement of his hand or finger." Another radical admired by Foot is Thomas Paine, whose reformist writings, shunned for many years in America, grew so popular in Europe that "he gained an international notoriety such as only pop stars have today." And with his literary heroes, including Swift, William Hazlitt, and Daniel Defoe, Foot's literary expertise and wit are as obvious as his radicalism. At times, Foot appears almost a British William F. Buckley--except with Socialist politics and without uppity pretension...
...will probably not do much more experimenting as a songwriter, nor will the Kinks drift far from their present course. Why should they? They are now more popular than ever. Ten years ago they would have had difficulty filling Jonathan Swift's; now they routinely pack Boston Garden. To say that they have sold out as artists would be ludicrous. "Artistic Integrity" is a term more often used by critics with steady incomes than by artists themselves, and if the Kinks haven't proven their artistic integrity, then nobody during the last two decades has earned the designation...