Word: thanklessness
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Writing a Bernard Shaw biography is perhaps the most inviting and yet the most thankless task in the literary game, because all his life Shaw wrote his own. He was the most articulate, most relentlessly self-documenting man of his time. The publication of yet another book about G.B.S., therefore, seems both foolhardy and unnecessary. But this one is timely, for it comes at a moment when pygmy critics are beginning to kick the dead giant around (TIME, Aug. 13). Irish Dramatist St. John Ervine suggests both why the critics are acting that way and why they are wrong...
Died. Dr. Gerrit J. Van Heuven Goedhart, 55, tall, intense U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees since 1950, whose office won the 1954 Nobel Peace Prize for its thankless task of finding "permanent solutions" to the plight of some 350,000 anti-Communist refugees in Europe and Asia; of a heart attack while playing tennis; in Geneva, Switzerland. Prewar editor (1929-33) of the big Amsterdam Telegraaf, bald, brilliant Dr. Goedhart became a top-ranking resistance leader, later (1944) moved to London as Minister of Justice in the Dutch government in exile. Lately embittered by apparent indifference to the plight...
...trees, then with the pastoral charm of tinkling goat bells and squat white stone houses, and finally with its people, who teach him a language of the heart that is puzzlingly Greek to him. Biggest puzzle of all is his Venus de Miloesque wife Iris, who plunges into the thankless chore of running a local clinic without an outward trace of pity for the poverty and peasant ignorance of her fellow islanders. What she is trying to smother in work, Patrick belatedly discovers, is a long-smoldering love interest in the humbly born manager of the family estate, who happens...
...Premier Alexander Papagos gave Karamanlis the thankless ministry of public works, a graveyard of politicians that had been starved of funds for years. Karamanlis moved in briskly, scraped together a budget, and in 2½ years built and resurfaced hundreds of miles of roads, brought water to thousands of acres of reclaimed land through dam and irrigation projects, replaced his native Salonika's ancient cobblestone streets with asphalt. On inspection trips he often sat down with the work gangs and shared their cheese and olives. What was even more unheard of, he clamped down on contractors, docked them...
...half of the Knighthoods), there were flashes of individual pride and pleasure as the list was published. Of all "the incongruous duties which our Constitution imposes upon the Prime Minister," mourned Herbert Henry Asquith more than a quarter of a century ago, "there is none, in my experience, more thankless, more irksome and more invidious than the recommendation of honors to the Crown...