Word: took
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...three weeks, haggling for a caravan to take them into India. On from Kashgar, the route led 500 miles to Kargalik, through the walled, rug-making, Moslem town of Yarkand. Mutinous Chinese Nationalist troops, who had not been paid for seven months, were in possession of Yarkand, and it took Paxton's smoothest Chinese to talk his party's way through. Paxton dismissed the truck and the jeeps, and hired ten caravan men with 33 horses and a handful of camels and donkeys. A white mongrel dog named It (Turki dialect for dog) decided to join the caravan...
...government corporation had plenty of excuses. First there were heavy rains, then a severe drought. The bush in the Kongwa district had "proved unduly obstinate"; it took eight hours to clear one acre instead of the estimated two. Kongwa soil hardens until it becomes "like a tennis court." Tractors had been mishandled by native labor. Even African animals turned saboteurs. Wild pigs made a goober feast of one experimental farm, and telephone lines were constantly broken by mild but shortsighted giraffes who got entangled in the wires...
...Plummer, the corporation's chairman and Labor's vice president in charge of groundnuts, also had some excuse for this. In the first year (1947-48), the scheme had been run by a subsidiary of the empire-wide business colossus, Unilever. Plummer claimed that when his corporation took over a year ago, the books were already in chaos. This did not satisfy one Tory M.P., who exploded: "Damned if any shareholders but the British public would stand for any business of theirs being run this way!" Conservatives were happily whetting their knives for a parliamentary debate...
Ernie Byfield, Chicago hotelman and nightclub impresario (the Pump Room, the College Inn), reached 60, took a dim view of the bistro business: "Nightclubs are like gold mines. For every ten bucks you put in, one buck is extracted . . . Old nightclubs and old streetwalkers are the same. The older they get, the less money they take...
...writes, that the idea first took root that psychoanalysis and religion could somehow lie down together and live happily ever after. "In America all races and creeds live and work peacefully side by side-why should not ideas do likewise? . . . It is . . .in such a benign climate of opinion that the current love affair between psychoanalysis and religion has been, time & again, consummated. There have been bickerings . . . and the Catholic Church has shown itself to be a rather frigid partner. But, all in all, things have gone well, and the occasional Catholic reserve has been more than made...