Word: upper
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...burden hits hard at every level. Upper-class families in the cities demand steep cash payments from a bride's family in return for a well-educated, well-connected bridegroom. A young man who holds a job in the prestigious Indian administrative service or the Indian foreign service, for example, can command $10,000 or more in dowry payment. Valuable consumer goods such as refrigerators, television sets and automobiles are commonly tossed in as part of the deal...
...Fred erick Lugard, who was to become Nigeria's first Governor, traveled to an inner principality called Borgu and succeeded in getting two treaties signed in favor of the British Royal Niger Company. As he returned there was a brief skirmish. Lugard reported with the stiffest possible upper lip: "The only casualty in the fighting line was myself, an arrow having penetrated deep into my skull." When he got home, he sustained another grievous wound: the signatures on the treaties were fake...
People start to leave for the cast party in Adams House Upper Common Room. Pace and conversation are slow as they leave Radcliffe Yard. An actress hums 'Adeline,' a song from the show. When they reach Adams House, taped dance music blares too loudly for her to continue. A balloon pops, as in punctuation; shreds of orange rubber float to the floor now cluttered with cigarettes and booze...
...walls and floors. In the middle, in the big empty space, people are dancing. From up above them seem one pulsating mass--a motley, throbbing protoplasm that expands and contracts in rhythm to the newest disco song. As the music reaches fever pitch, it threatens to engulf the upper mezzanines, slide out to the hallway, push itself out the door and burst smokily all over Lansdowne Street...
...nothing Donleavy enjoys more than spoofing the follies of polite society. He has had some time to observe these, having fled the hopelessly declasse shores of New York City, his birthplace, to more genteel echelons in Ireland. His first novel, The Ginger Man, instantly revealed an affection for the upper classes and their dirty linen. In creating Sebastian Dangerfield, dissolute hero and impoverished aristocrat, Donleavy unleashed one of the most charming rogues of twentieth century English literature--suave, jaunty, devilishly...