Word: tins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Edward Wilson, secret agent of His Majesty's Government in World War II, sat on a hotel balcony and sourly surveyed the West African seaport to which he had been assigned. He saw row upon row of hot and hideous tin roofs sloping away toward the sea, and a ringing clang came to his ears as a vulture perched heavily on top of the hotel. Down at the quayside, pickaninnies swarmed like little vultures around a newly landed seaman and triumphantly escorted him to the local brothel...
Less cheerful but more typical of what was happening to Britain's "last chance" empire was a recent scene in the slums of Accra, Gold Coast colony. A young native sprawled sullenly in the shade of a tin-roofed shack, cluttered with goats, baskets, buckets and children. Out of the dry dusty litter a pigeon loft reared up ten feet into the hot air. "I fight in war," said the young native. "I discharged. Money gone. No work. No go back up country." He slumped farther back in the shade of the pigeon loft. Said a white colonial official...
...taken lessons from some Renaissance master. But his subjects are a modern nightmare. His women, like modern Madonnas, mourn, eyes shut against the world. A disfigured war hero stares numbly out of his canvas, his blind eye patched with paper money, his chest covered with worthless medals of tin, cork, broken combs, and tiny crutches. Poleo's trees are dead, his earth pocked and parched, his cities mere ruins and rubble. In some paintings, there are no signs of life at all-only tiny ladders down which the human race has fled to escape an atomic...
Matty likes the prospects. His company will take a 5% cut on every ton of goods that it moves. First haul in sight: $170 million worth of rubber, tin, pepper, tapioca, etc., already stockpiled and ready for shipment as soon as the Dutch lift their economic blockade against the islands...
There is method in Matty's seeming madness about U.S. competitors. Before the war, Indonesia was the hallowed preserve of Dutch and British traders and cartels (notably tin and rubber), which all but shut U.S. business out of the islands' billion-dollar-a-year (at '48 prices) trade. Matty Fox is determined to keep them from regaining their hold. Last week he was making the rounds of U.S. companies, inviting them to step right through the archipelago's open door-when it opens...