Word: undertook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...doing something remarkable largely in order to write a delightful book about how awful it was. At the age of 50, and more out of curiosity than a sense of competition ("For me the question was not whether it could be done, but whether I could do it"), he undertook a 1,100-mile hike from one end of Britain to the other. In the course of it, he managed to be fogbound on Dartmoor, musclebound in Bristol and sodden in Somerset. He was rained upon almost everywhere (though not, oddly, at a place in Scotland called Hill of Drip...
...less than enthusiastic reception in Bucharest, Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev stayed home. In his place, Moscow sent a delegate of lesser rank: Konstantin Katushev, party secretary in charge of dealing with foreign ruling parties. At 42, Katushev is, nonetheless, a rapidly rising figure in the Kremlin, and he undertook a spirited rebuttal to Ceauşescu the next day. For openers, he took a rather startling swipe at the "perfidious tactics of 'bridge building' to the West." Its only purpose, he said, is "to drive a wedge between the socialist countries...
...organize new elections for the presidency of France, and he must get along with the government of Premier Maurice Couve de Murville until De Gaulle's elected successor is chosen. Yet Alain Poher, a rotund, 60-year-old moderate and veteran of a lifetime in French politics, undertook his duties as interim President of France last week with a sure sense of purpose and resolve that surprised and annoyed the Gaullists...
...education for all. Yet, if enrollment has doubled in ten years, the results are mixed. One reason is the sheer incoherence of big, bureaucratic universities that allow "research"?much of it trivial?to overshadow everything else. Jacques Barzun likens the current U.S. campus to the medieval guild which "undertook to do everything for the town." The university today, he writes in The American University, "aids the poor, redesigns the slums, advises the small tradesmen, runs a free clinic, gives legal aid, and supplies volunteers to hospitals, recreation centers and remedial schools. The only thing the guild used to provide...
...mother wrote of five-year-old Ernest, "he shouts out fraid a nothing."" But he felt compelled to spend half a lifetime proving it. An astonishing number of Baker's pages-and the book's rich lode of rarely seen illustrations-document the journeys Hemingway undertook to various test sites of courage: high school football in Oak Park, 111., three wars, hunting grounds from Idaho to Africa, boxing and bull rings, ski slopes, four marriage beds...