Word: unreality
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...when the Nazi war machine had rolled over another one, recognized the Government in exile. So it was with Norway, The Netherlands, Luxembourg; so it threatened to be for many more. It was a grim, unvaried procession, that at its best made U. S. policy seem well-meaning, unimaginative, unreal...
Lord Lothian was indeed ill; he was dying. In the big, red-brick Embassy in Washington the Ambassador, a devout Christian Scientist, lay suffering the final ravages of uremic poisoning that to his faith was real only to the material world, unreal to the world of the spirit. Since his return to the U. S. from London three weeks before, the hearty, ruddy-cheeked Ambassador had gone out little. But sometimes he would ask old friends in for brief, quiet talk, of no immediate relation to war and his work, as if wanting to reassure himself that they were still...
...main criticism levelled against the theory courses, it is hardly serious enough to demand rebuttal. The abstractions, the artificially simplified models, are merely the skeleton which the flesh of facts and complications is later to cover. In an elementary course in physics, for example, there are unreal hypothesis. Friction may be ignored, or no account may be taken of developments in quanta analysis. A subject has to start somewhere. It is better to start from the assumption that tractors can be converted into printing presses than from an involved discussion of the concepts of periods of production...
...Spain and France there was no rejoicing, only a queer, unreal enthusiasm. Arriba of Madrid, the Falangist paper, tried to take consolation in a link of blood with ancient Germans. Basques, Asturians, Castilians, it said, "bear the unmistakable imprint of their Visigoth origin." In Paris, Le Temps's editorial writer cut a tiny gem of black futility: "There are days when it is difficult to write anything at all on any subject whatsoever...
There is no such unreal detachment in another English tale, Landfall (Morrow, $2.50) by Nevil Shute (real name: Nevil Shute Norway). Five months before World War II began, Shute's novel, Ordeal, depicted its coming horrors with remarkable power and prescience. Onetime dirigible builder and airplane manufacturer, Shute is now working at the Admiralty, wrote Landfall in his spare time. It is the story of an R. A. F. pilot on the Channel patrol who sinks a submarine, falls in love with a barmaid. The Navy thinks the submarine was British; Mona, her ears open behind the bar, sets...