Word: thackeray
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...grim Moscow prison, two Americans while away the hours of their lonely confinement. They read Dickens, Thackeray and the Bible; they write letters to their wives. It has been nearly five months since Air Force Lieutenants F. B. Olmstead and John McKone and four companions were shot down in their RB-47 reconnaissance plane over the Barents Sea. The two young officers were captured, brought to Moscow on loudly trumpeted but plainly trumped-up charges of espionage. The body of one fellow airman was returned to the U.S.; the others are listed as missing...
...highly improbable combination of genes," in Grandson Julian's phrase, is needed to explain Huxley's many-faceted genius. His father, who died mad, was a poor schoolmaster at Great Ealing (a school attended by Thackeray, Cardinal Newman and W. S. Gilbert); Tom was a pupil there briefly, and hated it. As a "plebeian,"' which is what he proudly called himself, young Huxley could not hope for a university education in 19th century England, but a scholarship and a medical brother-in-law saved him from the obscurity of the uneducated. He graduated in medicine from London...
...boyhood while the Brahmins ran Boston and the want ads read: "No Irish need apply." He decided that politics was the quickest vehicle to carry him from shanty to lace curtains, developed two tricks to grease the passage. He haunted public libraries, feasted on Shakespeare, Dumas, Dickens and Thackeray, became a silver-throated orator. And he played skillfully and sometimes shamelessly on the pride and privation of Boston's Irish poor...
...encountering a formidable talent. But, as was the case with Proust and Joyce, his greatest impact may be on other writers-who have become increasingly dismayed at the possibility of finding anything to say in the "realistic" novel that has not already been said better by Tolstoy. Dostoevsky, Melville, Thackeray, Balzac...
...shoe sailor," (i.e., no airman), whose square, salt-cured features are often belied by a suave, diplomatic air that sometimes spills over into pomposity. In civvies he sports a Malacca cane. He is something of a connoisseur of wines. He interlards his conversation with phrases out of Dickens or Thackeray, loves to write what he calls "erudite letters" (favorite word: vouchsafe). "If he will ever be known for any command, it will be for his command of the English language," said one officer who served on his staff, and Holloway adds to the impression when he tells his officers...